Richard Saul Wurman has published 80 books over the last 50 years; founded the TED & TEDMED conferences; and founded EG. He studied architecture at Penn and had a deep professional relationship with architect Louis Kahn. Wurman’s oeuvre is outrageously eclectic, but all springs from the same source: his own ignorance. The result has been a series of books ranging from city guides to health manuals to volumes on financial planning and the Olympics. Grants and awards include: NEA, Guggenheim, Graham Fellowships, Chandler Fellowships, the Kevin Lynch Award from MIT, several honorary doctorates (University of the Arts; Art Center College of Design; Art Institute of Boston). And he has taught at universities including Cambridge, CCNY, UCLA, USC, Washington University, and Princeton. In 1958 he was a member of the initial year of exploration and mapping of Tikal in Guatemala. Wurman’s latest project—dubbed 19.20.21.— is an attempt to standardize the information available on 19 cities that are expected to have more than 20 million inhabitants in the 21st century, giving readers, again, tools to easily compare and contrast them. He lives in Newport, Rhode Island with his wife, novelist Gloria Nagy, and their three biblical yellow labs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
