Randall Munroe was born in Easton, Pennsylvania on October 17, 1984. He received a degree in physics from Christopher Newport University. He got a job building robots at NASA Langley Research Center. In 2006, he left NASA to draw comics on the internet full-time. He is the author of the popular webcomic xkcd, the science question-and-answer blog What If, and the New York Times bestseller What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions.