Author of at least ten books, he has appeared on CBS This Morning and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as a correspondent.

He also designed the treasure map in the 1984 film, Romancing the Stone, starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito.

degree summa cum laude from Harvard, is the winner of the first National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Chicago magazine once called him "the smartest man in the world," but Hoffman claims the editors must have caught him on a particularly good day.

Before joining Liberty Science Center in October 2011, Hoffman was the editorial chairman of the video interview website Big Think, where he personally interviewed Dick Cavett, Richard Dawkins, Annie Duke, Arianna Huffington, John Irving, Penn Jillette, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov and Ed Koch, among others.