Randall Munroe

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

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

Munroe has worked full-time on the comic since late 2006.

In addition to publishing a book of the webcomic's strips, titled xkcd: Volume 0, he has written four books: What If?, Thing Explainer, How To, and ''What If?

2''.

Munroe was born in Easton, Pennsylvania.

His father has worked as an engineer and marketer.

He has two younger siblings, including a brother named Doug, and was raised as a Quaker.

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

After graduating from the Chesterfield County Mathematics and Science High School at Clover Hill in Midlothian, Virginia, he graduated from Christopher Newport University in 2006 with a degree in physics.

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

In late 2006, he left NASA, and moved to Boston to focus on webcomics full time.

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

Its tagline describes it as "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language".

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.

The webcomic quickly became very popular, garnering up to 70 million hits a month by October 2007.

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

Munroe now supports himself by the sale of xkcd-related merchandise, primarily thousands of t-shirts a month.

He licenses his xkcd creations under the Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial 2.5, stating that it is not just about the free culture movement, but that it also makes good business sense.

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

Originally developed to moderate one of Munroe's xkcd-related Internet Relay Chat (IRC) 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.

If users continue to send unoriginal messages, Robot9000 mutes the user for a longer period, quadrupling for each unoriginal message the user sends to the channel.

Shortly after Munroe's blog post about the script went live, 4chan administrator Christopher Poole adapted the script to moderate the site's experimental /r9k/ board.

Twitch trialed R9K mode as a beta feature, and eventually introduced it under the name "unique-chat mode".

In October 2008, The New Yorker magazine online published an interview and "Cartoon Off" between Munroe and Farley Katz, in which each cartoonist drew a series of four humorous cartoons.

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.

In early 2010, 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.

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 Munroe published the resulting list of 954 named RGB web colors on the xkcd website.

They have since been adopted as conventional color identifiers in various programming and markup languages, including Python and LaTeX.

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 the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story for the xkcd strip "Time".

Munroe is the creator of the now defunct websites "The Funniest", "The Cutest", and "The Fairest", each of which presents users with two options and asks them to choose one over the other.

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

Munroe has a blog entitled What If?, where he has answered questions sent in by fans of his comics.

These questions are usually absurd and related to math or physics, and he explains them using both his knowledge and various academic sources.

Starting in November 2019, Munroe began writing a monthly column in The New York Times titled Good Question, answering user-submitted questions in the same style as What If.

A sequel, ''What If?