James Gleick
James Gleick is one of America’s preeminent science writers, a journalist and author whose books have shaped the way educated general readers understand some of the deepest ideas in modern science. Born on August 1, 1954, in New York City, Gleick studied literature at Harvard University before embarking on a career in journalism, working as an editor and reporter at The New York Times. His turn toward science writing produced a body of work remarkable for its intellectual depth, narrative drive, and lasting influence.
His first major book, Chaos: Making a New Science (1987), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and became an international bestseller. The book chronicled the emergence of chaos theory — the study of complex, nonlinear systems — and introduced concepts like the butterfly effect to a mass audience. Gleick’s ability to tell the story of a scientific revolution through the personal histories of the scientists who made it set a new standard for popular science writing.
He followed this with Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992), a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist that was again a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The book remains one of the most admired scientific biographies in the English language. His subsequent work Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (1999) examined the cultural and technological forces behind the modern obsession with speed, while Isaac Newton (2003) offered a concise and penetrating portrait of the father of classical physics.
Gleick’s most ambitious recent work, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011), traces the concept of information from African talking drums through the invention of writing, the telegraph, computing, and the internet, arguing that information is the fundamental fabric of the universe. It won the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. Gleick also wrote Time Travel: A History (2016). Throughout his career he has combined the instincts of a skilled journalist with a humanist’s appreciation for ideas, producing science writing of the highest calibre.