Background

Randall Petrick Munroe was born on October 17, 1984, in Easton, Pennsylvania, United States. He is the son of an engineer and has two younger brothers. He grew up outside Richmond, Virginia. When Randall was a child, his father did activities with him that taught him a lot about how things work. Then he found a physics book and it interested him. From an early age, he was a fan of comic strips in newspapers, starting off with Calvin and Hobbes.

Education

Randall Munroe studied at Math & Science High School at Clover Hill where he started drawing comics. Then he went to Christopher Newport University. He was one of only four physics majors in a graduating class of about 1000. He got an internship at NASA’s Langley Research Center working on virtual reality systems, and then took a job in NASA’s robotics navigation lab. He enjoyed it quite a bit, although he had trouble focusing on a particular area and so ended up with a Bachelor of Science degree in 2006.

Career

Randall Munroe is the creator of the popular online-blog xkcd. Before starting xkcd, he worked on robots at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia. In 2006, he left NASA to draw comics on the internet full-time, supporting himself through the sale of xkcd t-shirts, prints, posters, and books. xkcd is primarily a stick figure comic with themes in computer science, technology, mathematics, science, philosophy, language, pop culture, romance, and physics. His webcomic xkcd uses simple cartoons and diagrams to make science funny, touching and incredibly clear. In his latest series, Munroe has simplified the workings behind everything from space rockets to smartphones, while using only the thousand most common words in the English language.

In January 2008, Munroe developed an open-source chat moderation script named "Robot9000". In 2010, he published a collection of the comics. He has also toured the lecture circuit, giving speeches at places such as Google's Googleplex in Mountain View, California. Munroe is also the creator of the now-defunct websites "The Funniest", "The Cutest", and "The Fairest". Munroe runs a blog entitled What If? where he answers questions sent in by fans of his comics. In 2014, he published a collection of some of the responses, as well as a few new ones and some rejected questions, in a book entitled What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. In 2019 he published his new book How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. Illustrated by formulas that humorously explain the science behind Munroe’s conjectures, this book will entertain and educate.

Achievements

• Randall Munroe's books What If? and Thing Explainer are #1 New York Times bestsellers. Munroe was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist in 2011 and in 2012. In 2014, he won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story for the xkcd strip "Time". His book What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions was sold around 625,000 copies. An asteroid was named in his honor. The name was accepted by the International Astronomical Union.

Works

More photos

• book

  • How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

    (For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a...)

    2019
  • Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words

    (Have you ever tried to learn more about some incredible t...)

    2015
  • What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

    (From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hil...)

    2014
  • xkcd: volume 0

    (Randall Munroe describes xkcd as a webcomic of romance, s...)

    2010

Views

Quotations: "A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them."

"The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."

"Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously."

"I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express."

"The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics."

"I'm not sure why we romanticize 'young love,' or love in general...It just leads to the idea that either your love is pure, perfect and eternal, and you are storybook-compatible in every way with no problems, or you're LYING when you say 'I love you."

Personality

Randall Munroe likes candlelight dinners, long walks on the beach, and TV series Homestuck.

Quotes from others about the person

• “Randall Munroe writes all of the best science books.” - Hank Green

Interests

• kite aerial photography

Connections

In September 2011, Munroe announced that he married his fiancée.