Short answers, pulled from the story.
Vernor Vinge was an American science fiction author and mathematics professor who lived from the 2nd of October 1944 to the 20th of March 2024. He is best known as the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singularity concept and among the earliest authors to depict cyberspace in fiction. He won five Hugo Awards across novels and novellas.
Vernor Vinge won five Hugo Awards: for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999), and Rainbows End (2006), and for his novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2001) and The Cookie Monster (2004). His win for A Fire Upon the Deep was a tie with Connie Willis's Doomsday Book.
True Names, published in 1981, is widely regarded as the first story to present a fully realized concept of cyberspace. It depicted a networked virtual world that would later become central to the cyberpunk movement through writers including William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.
Vinge taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He retired from teaching in 2000 to write science fiction full-time.
Vinge's first published short story was "Apartness", which appeared in the June 1965 issue of the British magazine New Worlds. His second story, "Bookworm, Run!", was published in the March 1966 issue of Analog Science Fiction.
Vernor Vinge died in La Jolla, California on the 20th of March 2024, at the age of 79. He had Parkinson's disease.