Randall Munroe
Randall Munroe is an author.
Randall Munroe is an American cartoonist, author and engineer, best known as the creator of xkcd, the stick-figure webcomic he has worked on full-time since late 2006. The strip made its name on a narrow but productive premise: treat a ridiculous question with complete technical seriousness and see where the arithmetic lands. He collected the comic as xkcd: Volume 0, then wrote four books that extend the same method into prose. What If? answers reader hypotheticals with physics, Thing Explainer describes complicated machines using only the thousand most common English words, How To gives deliberately terrible engineering advice in great detail, and What If? 2 returns to the question box.
Books (5)
Where to start with Randall Munroe
Start with What If?. It is the purest form of the method, and the answers involving the moon and a mole of moles are worth the price on their own. Thing Explainer is the one to hand a curious ten-year-old, though the thousand-word constraint wears thin across a whole book. How To is the best written of the four. xkcd collects the strips themselves, which remain the thing most readers know him for.