James Gleick

American science writer and journalist whose books on chaos, information, and scientific biography have set the standard for accessible popular science writing since the 1980s.

James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science, published in 1987, introduced the general reading public to chaos theory and the science of complex systems at a moment when the field was genuinely new and exciting. Gleick had a gift for finding the human stories inside mathematics — the eccentric scientists, the accidental discoveries, the moments when a new framework began to displace an old one — and Chaos remains one of the most effective works of science popularization produced in the twentieth century. It was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, published in 2011, tackles an even larger subject: the nature of information itself, from African drumming and Charles Babbage through Shannon’s information theory and the digital age. The book is ambitious to the point of occasional sprawl, but its ambition is earned. Gleick has an unusual ability to make abstract mathematical concepts feel historically situated and humanly meaningful, and The Information rewards patient readers who follow its long arc.

Gleick writes with precision and elegance, and his books hold up well because he never sacrifices accuracy for accessibility. He asks his readers to do real intellectual work. The criticism occasionally made is that his books can be dense and demanding for readers without scientific backgrounds, but that rigor is also what separates his work from lighter popular science. He is one of the best practitioners the genre has produced.