Brian Hayes

Brian Hayes takes great pleasure in writing about mathematics and computation. He began his career as an editor at Scientific American and later was Editor-in-Chief of American Scientist magazine, where for 25 years he wrote a column on computing in the sciences. His writing has also appeared in Computer Language, Discover, Natural History, The Sciences, and other periodicals, as well as on his own website, http://bit-player.org. Some of his essays have been reprinted in anthologies such as The Norton Reader, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, Beautiful Code, and several annual editions of The Best Writing on Mathematics. He is the author of Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape (W. W. Norton, 2005); Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions (Hill and Wang, 2008); and Foolproof, and Other Mathematical Meditations (MIT Press, 2017). Since 2010, Hayes has been an Associate of the Institute for Applied Computational Science at Harvard University, and since 2016 a Fellow of Y Combinator Research.