Tony is the son of science fiction writer Milton A. Rothman.Rothman has a B.A. from Swarthmore College, (1975) and a Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin (1981), where he studied at the Center for Relativity. He continued on post-doctoral fellowships at Oxford, the University of Moscow and the University of Cape Town.

Rothman worked briefly as an editor at Scientific American, then taught at Harvard, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bryn Mawr College and more recently at Princeton University.

Rothman's scientific research has been concerned mainly with general relativity and cosmology, for which he has made contributions to the study of the early universe, specifically cosmic nucleosynthesis, black holes, inflationary cosmology and gravitons.

Rothman was the scientific editor for Andrei Sakharov's Memoirs and he has contributed to numerous magazines, including Scientific American, Discover, The New Republic and History Today. He has played oboe at a professional level and commissioned a concerto from Aleksandr Raskatov.

Tony Rothman's first book, written just after graduating college, was The World is Round (Ballantine, 1978), a science fiction novel about the evolution of society on a planet with a rather uncommon feature. His experiences in Russia resulted in publication of a collection of short stories entitled Censored Tales (1989). He has also published six books of popular science and science history. His collection A Physicist on Madison Avenue (1991) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, while Doubt and Certainty, with George Sudarshan, was chosen by the A-List as one of the 200 best books of 1998. He co-authored Sacred Mathematics: Japanese Temple Geometry with Fukagawa Hidetoshi. This was the first history of sangaku in English, was published during 2008 and won the Association of American Publisher's 2008 PROSE award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in mathematics.

Rothman's published writings encompass hundreds of works in 7 languages and include 3,073 library holdings.

• 2008 — Sacred mathematics: Japanese temple geometry (with Hidetoshi Fukagawa)
• 2003 — Everything's relative: and other fables from science and technology
• 1998 — Doubt and certainty: the celebrated academy
• 1995 — Instant physics: from Aristotle to Einstein, and beyond
• 1991 — A physicist on Madison Avenue
• 1989 — Science à la mode: physical fashions and fictions
• 1989 — Censored tales
• 1985 — Frontiers of modern physics: new perspectives on cosmology, relativity, black holes, and extraterrestrial intelligence
• 1978 — The world is round