About the author
Ben Klemens has worked on computational modeling projects in a surprising range of contexts, including work on cross-border migration at the World Bank, terrorist networks and voter turnout with the Brookings Institution, the genetic roots of mental disorders with the National Institute of Mental Health, network externalities as a grad student at Caltech, and even flogging in the 19th-century U.S. Navy at NYU.
He wrote Modeling with Data from a sense that there is a rift between how statistics is taught at the university and how it is practiced in the trenches, where the data is never clean and the textbook methods never quite apply.
The author in 2007, relaxing at the Jardin botanique de Montréal, editing a draft of the textbook.
Ben has also worked extensively to keep mathematics and code like that discussed here free of legal encumbrance. His first book, Math You Can't Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software, was outspoken when it was written in 2004, but its recommendations have largely been accepted by decisionmakers in the U.S. patent system.
For a full list of Ben's readily available work, see his download and résumé page.