Biography
He received a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Yale University in May 1996. His undergraduate thesis was "The Geometry of Critical Ising Clusters", under the direction of Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractal geometry. He then worked at the IBM Watson Research Center in the theoretical physics department, and began graduate study at Stanford University in 1996. He received his PhD. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 under the direction of Gerald Sussman: his thesis topic was " Diversity of Evolving Systems: Scaling and Dynamics of Genealogical Trees " He then joined the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Simon A. Levin, the Moffett professor of Biology in 2005, and was in that position at his early death.
His hobby of collecting place names led Rauch to found MetaCarta with John Frank and Doug Brenhouse. Using MetaCarta's software, Rauch developed maps like the four below for fun. Rauch was an inventor of spatial information processing systems.
He founded several organizations, including
- ALife
- TerraShare
- MetaCarta.
He died in a hiking accident in California's Sequoia National Park at age 31.
Read more about this topic: Erik Rauch
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