He did a year of graduate work in mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles. He briefly attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics (with a minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, in 1962.
In fact, much of his writing since the 1970s has been in collaboration, particularly with Pournelle, Steven Barnes, Brenda Cooper, or Edward M. He co-authored a number of novels with Jerry Pournelle. Niven created an alien species, the Kzin, which were featured in a series of twelve collection books, the Man-Kzin Wars. His fantasy includes The Magic Goes Away series, which utilizes an exhaustible resource, called Mana, to make the magic a non-renewable resource. Niven also often includes elements of detective fiction and adventure stories. The creation of thoroughly worked-out alien species, which are very different from humans both physically and mentally, is recognized as one of Niven's main strengths. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics. Laurence van Cott Niven's best known work is Ringworld(Ringworld, #1) (1970), which received the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. It is one of the most visible influences of the Ringworld concept on popular culture. The Ringworld-like namesake of the Halo video game series is the eponymous Halo megastructure/superweapon. Alastair Reynolds also uses ringworlds in his 2008 novel House of Suns. Banks in his Culture series, which features about 1/100th ringworld-size megastructures called Orbitals that orbit a star rather than encircling it entirely. This idea proved influential, serving as an alternative to a full Dyson Sphere that required fewer assumptions (such as artificial gravity) and allowed a day/night cycle to be introduced (through the use of a smaller ring of "shadow squares", rotating between the ring and its sun).
When it was pointed out to Niven that the Ringworld was dynamically unstable, in that once the center of rotation drifted away from the central sun, gravity would pull the ring into contact with the star, he used this as a plot element in the sequel novel, The Ringworld Engineers. Given that spinning a Dyson Sphere would result in the atmosphere pooling around the equator, the Ringworld removes all the extraneous parts of the structure, leaving a spinning band landscaped on the sun-facing side, with the atmosphere and inhabitants kept in place through centrifugal force and 1000 mile high perimeter walls (rim walls). The idea's genesis came from Niven's attempts to imagine a more efficient version of a Dyson Sphere, which could produce the illusion of surface gravity through rotation. Niven's most famous contribution to the SF genre is his concept of the Ringworld, a band of approximately the same diameter as Earth's orbit rotating around a star.
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