Short answers, pulled from the story.
James Gleick is best known for Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011), both international bestsellers. Chaos made the butterfly effect a household term, while The Information won the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books in 2012.
James Gleick is an American author and historian of science born on the 1st of August 1954 in New York City. He graduated from Harvard College in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics and spent a decade at The New York Times as an editor and science reporter before publishing his first book.
James Gleick founded The Pipeline in 1993, one of the earliest internet service providers in New York City. It was the first ISP to offer a graphical user interface combining e-mail, chat, Usenet, and the World Wide Web, and he sold it to PSINet in 1995.
The Information won the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books in 2012. Three of Gleick's books have been finalists for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and his books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
Gleick is cited as part of the inspiration for the Jurassic Park character Ian Malcolm. His 1987 book Chaos: Making a New Science influenced Michael Crichton when writing Jurassic Park, with Gleick himself contributing to the basis for the character.
On the 20th of December 1997, Gleick was attempting to land a Rutan Long-EZ experimental plane at Greenwood Lake Airport in West Milford, New Jersey, when carburetor ice caused the engine to lose power. The plane landed short of the runway into rising terrain, killing his eight-year-old son Harry and leaving Gleick seriously injured.