23 Facts About Randall Munroe

Randall Patrick Munroe was born on October 17,1984 and is an American cartoonist, author, and engineer best known as the creator of the webcomic xkcd.

Randall Munroe was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Virginia.

Randall Munroe has two younger brothers and was raised as a Quaker.

Randall Munroe was a fan of comic strips in newspapers from an early age, starting with Calvin and Hobbes.

Randall Munroe worked as a contract programmer and roboticist for NASA at the Langley Research Center before and after his graduation with a physics degree.

Randall Munroe's webcomic, entitled xkcd, is primarily a stick figure comic.

Randall Munroe had originally used xkcd as an instant messaging screenname because he wanted a name without a meaning so he would not eventually grow tired of it.

Randall Munroe registered the domain name, but left it idle until he started posting his drawings, perhaps in September 2005.

In 2008, Randall Munroe said, "I think the comic that's gotten me the most feedback is actually the one about the stoplights".

Randall Munroe has toured the lecture circuit, giving speeches at places such as Google's Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

The popularity of the strip among science fiction fans resulted in Randall Munroe being nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist in 2011 and again in 2012.

In January 2008, Randall Munroe developed an open-source chat moderation script named "Robot9000".

Originally developed to moderate one of Randall Munroe's xkcd-related Internet Relay Chat channels, the software's algorithm attempts to prevent repetition in IRC channels by temporarily muting users who send messages that are identical to a message that has been sent to the channel before.

In early 2010, Randall Munroe ran the xkcd Color Name Survey, in which participants were shown a series of RGB colors and asked to enter a suitable name for each specific color.

Randall Munroe wanted to identify colors which were given identical or highly similar names by a large number of survey participants, which would then serve as an approximate list of the most common colors rendered similarly across a range of computer monitors.

Over 200,000 people eventually completed the survey, and Randall Munroe published the resulting list of 954 named RGB web colors on the xkcd website.

In 2015, The New Yorker published "The Space Doctor's Big Idea", an article by Randall Munroe explaining general relativity using only the 1,000 most common English words.

Randall Munroe published an xkcd-style comic on scientific publishing and open access in Science in October 2013.

In February 2019, Randall Munroe announced his next book, How To, which was released in September of that year.

In September 2013, Randall Munroe announced that a group of xkcd readers had submitted his name as a candidate for the renaming of asteroid 1987 DU6 to 4942 Randall Munroe.

In October 2010, Randall Munroe's fiancee was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer; there had been no prior family history.

In November 2012, Randall Munroe published a comic entitled "Two Years", reflecting on their relationship since his wife's breast cancer diagnosis.

Randall Munroe revisited the subject in December 2017 with a comic entitled "Seven Years" and again in November 2020 in a comic entitled "Ten Years".