Jon Kleinberg was born in 1971 in Boston, Massachusetts to a mathematics professor father and a computer consultant mother.

Since 1996 Kleinberg has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell, as well as a visiting scientist at IBM's Almaden Research Center.

Kleinberg realized that this generalization implies two different classes of important web pages, which he called "hubs" and "authorities".

[5][15] Among other honors, he received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship also known as the "genius grant" in 2005 and the Nevanlinna Prize in 2006, an award that is given out once every four years along with the Fields Medal as the premier distinction in Computational Mathematics.

[16] His new book is entitled "Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World", published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.