Randall Patrick Munroe is an American webcomic author, former NASA roboticist, and the creator
of the webcomic xkcd.
He and the webcomic have developed a cult following, and after leaving NASA he became
a professional webcomic artist.
Early life Munroe was a fan of the funny pages from an
early age, starting off with Calvin and Hobbes.
After graduating from the Chesterfield County Mathematics and Science High School at Clover
Hill: A Renaissance Program, he graduated from Christopher Newport University in 2006
with a degree in physics.
Career Robotics
Munroe worked as an Independent contracting roboticist for NASA at the Langley Research
Center before and after his graduation.
In October 2006 NASA did not renew his contract and he began to write xkcd full-time.
He now supports himself by the sale of xkcd related merchandise.
The webcomic quickly became very popular, garnering up to 70 million hits a month by
October 2007.
He has also toured the lecture circuit, giving speeches at such places as Google's Googleplex
in Mountain View, California.
Webcomic
xkcd is primarily a stick figure comic with themes in computer science, technology, mathematics,
science, philosophy, language, pop culture and romance.
Munroe had originally used xkcd as an instant messaging screenname because he wanted a name
without a meaning so he wouldn't eventually grow tired of it.
He registered the domain name, but left it idle until he started posting his drawings
in September 2005.
The comic has a very loyal fanbase.
Munroe said, "I think the comic that's gotten me the most feedback is actually the one about
the stoplights".
Munroe licenses his xkcd creations under the Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial
2.5, stating that it isn't just about the free culture movement, but that it also makes
good business sense.
His income derives from the sale of merchandise to his fans, sales consisting of thousands
of t-shirts a month.
The popularity of the strip among science fiction fans resulted in Munroe being nominated
for a Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist in 2011 and again in 2012.
In 2014, he won a Best Graphic Story Hugo for Time.
Other projects
Munroe is the creator of the now defunct websites "The Funniest", "The Cutest", and "The Fairest",
each of which presents the user with two options and asks them to choose one over the other.
He started the "WetRiffs" website as a joke, one month after drawing the "Rule 34" comic,
"lamenting the lack of guitar-in-the-shower pictures on the internet."
LimerickDB encouraged the creation of new and the collection of old limericks, but is
no longer accessible.
He started a Geohashing wiki based on one of his comics which contains an algorithm
that generates pseudo-random coordinates around the world every day.
He has also started a project called "What if?"
where users post questions to the website which are usually absurd and physics/math
related, and he answers them using his own knowledge as well as various sources from
the web.
In response to concerns about the radiation released by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
disaster in 2011, and to remedy what he described as "confusing" reporting on radiation levels
in the media, Munroe created a chart of comparative radiation exposure levels.
The chart was rapidly adopted by print and online journalists in several countries, including
being linked to by online writers for The Guardian and The New York Times.
As a result of requests for permission to reprint the chart and to translate it into
Japanese, Munroe placed it in the public domain, but requested that his non-expert status should
be clearly stated in any reprinting.
Munroe published an xkcd-style comic on scientific publishing and open access in Science in October
2013.
Influence In September 2013, Munroe announced that a
group of xkcd readers had submitted his name as a candidate for the renaming of asteroid
1987 DU6 to 4942 Munroe which was accepted by the International Astronomical Union.
Personal life As of May 2008, Munroe is living in Somerville,
Massachusetts.
Munroe announced in June 2011 that his fiancée had been diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer,
and in September that they had married.
Munroe enjoys kite photography, in which cameras are attached to kites and pictures are then
taken of the ground or buildings.
Publications What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd
Hypothetical Questions.
London: John Murray, 2014.
ISBN 978-1848549579.
xkcd: volume 0.
Breadpig, 2009.
ISBN 978-0615314464.
References
External links xkcd – the webcomic's site with links to
his web store, forums, and blag