Siobhan Roberts

Siobhan Roberts is a Canadian author and science journalist. She is currently the inaugural Journalist in Residence at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute in Berkeley. While at SLMath, in part she is chipping away at two books: a biography of the mathematical logician Verena Huber-Dyson; and an annotated pictorial biography of the computer scientist Donald Knuth.

In 2020 and 2021 she was the Science Communicator in Residence for the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.

Roberts is a regular contributor to the New York Times. In 2020, she wrote eight articles addressing the coronavirus pandemic for NYT Science Times (including “Embracing the Uncertainties,” “This is the Future of the Pandemic,” “How to Think Like an Epidemiologist,” and “The Swiss Cheese Model of Pandemic Defense”)—a contribution to the Times’s 2021 public service Pulitzer Prize for pandemic coverage. In 2021, Roberts wrote a profile of the applied mathematician Ingrid Daubechies for The New York Times Magazine.

Her latest book is Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway (Bloomsbury, 2015). While writing the Conway biography, she was a frequent Director’s Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; and a Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

New editions of Genius at Play and The Man Who Saved Geometry: The Multidimensional Mind of Donald Coxeter (Roberts’s first book; Bloomsbury, 2006) are to be published by Princeton University Press in fall 2024.