Erik Rauch

Erik Rauch (May 15, 1974 – July 13, 2005) was a biophysicist and theoretical ecologist who worked at NECSI, MIT, Santa Fe Institute, Yale University, Princeton University, and other institutions. Rauch's most notable paper was published in Nature and concerned the mathematical modeling of the conservation of biodiversity.

Erik Rauch
Born
Erik Rauch

(1974-05-15)May 15, 1974
DiedJuly 13, 2005(2005-07-13) (aged 31)
California's Sequoia National Park
United States
NationalityAmerican
EducationMassachusetts Institute of Technology, Ph.D.
Stanford University
Yale University, B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics
OccupationBiophysicist and theoretical ecologist
EmployerNECSI
MIT
Santa Fe Institute
Yale University
IBM
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University
Known forFounder of MetaCarta, ALife, TerraShare

Biography

He received a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Yale University in May 1996, where he was the technician for campus humor magazine The Yale Record.[1] 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.[2]

He founded several organizations, including

He died in a hiking accident in California's Sequoia National Park at age 31.[3]

References
  1. The Yale Record. New Haven: Yale Record. November, 1994. p. 3.
  2. "Searching by using spatial document and spatial keyword document indexes (USPTO Application #20060036588)". Archived from the original on 2007-01-04. Retrieved 2006-03-16.
  3. "Body of missing hiker found in Sequoia National Park". July 15, 2005.
  • MetaCarta query for "vin" shows the outline of France
  • MetaCarta query for "vino" shows the outline of Italy
  • MetaCarta query for "wein" shows the outline of Germany
  • Scatter plot of consonant pairings in place names showing the distribution of linguistic influences
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