A Templeton Award winner, George Francis Rayner Ellis, FRS, is a cosmologist who now also works on the emergence of complexity and causation in complex systems. He is currently the Emeritus Distinguished Professor of complex systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Ellis graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1960 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and went on to receive a PhD in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from the University of Cambridge in 1964. He has lectured at the Universities of Cambridge, Texas, Chicago, Hamburg, Boston, and Alberta, was Professor of Cosmic Physics at SISSA (Trieste) for a number of years, and is the G C MacVittie Visiting Professor of Astronomy in the Mathematics Department at Queen Mary, London University. Ellis was co-author with Steven Hawking of The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, which was published in 1973. He was also the recipient of the Templeton Prize in 2004 and the Star of South Africa Medal, presented by President Nelson Mandela, in 1999.