Robert Kanigel is the author of The Man Who Knew Infinity, Eyes on the Street, The One Best Way, Hearing Homer's Song, and six other nonfiction books-in biography, history, history of science, and memoir. He has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar award as well as a Guggenheim fellowship. He spent earlier lives as a mechanical engineer, a professor of science writing at MIT, and a freelance writer of magazine articles, essays, and reviews. An avid cyclist and amateur mosaicist, he lives in Baltimore.