Randall Patrick Munroe (born October 17, 1984)[1][2][3] is an American cartoonist, author, and engineer best known as the creator of the webcomic xkcd.

[9][10][11] Munroe worked as a contract programmer and roboticist for NASA at the Langley Research Center[12][8] before and after his graduation with a physics degree.

[15] Munroe had originally used xkcd as an instant messaging screenname because he wanted a name without a meaning so he would not eventually grow tired of it.

[8][independent source needed] The webcomic quickly became very popular, garnering up to 70 million hits a month by October 2007.

[4][16] He licenses his xkcd creations under the Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial 2.5, stating that it is not just about the free culture movement, but that it also makes good business sense.

[19] He has also toured the lecture circuit, giving speeches at places such as Google's Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

[22] Munroe is the creator of the now defunct websites "The Funniest",[23] "The Cutest",[24] and "The Fairest",[25] each of which presents users with two options and asks them to choose one over the other.

[citation needed] In January 2008, Munroe developed an open-source chat moderation script named "Robot9000".

Over 200,000 people eventually completed the survey,[31] and Munroe published the resulting list of 954 named RGB web colors[32] on the xkcd website.

[34] In 2015, The New Yorker published "The Space Doctor's Big Idea", an article by Munroe explaining general relativity using only the 1,000 most common English words.

[48][7] On August 31, 2023, Munroe created a YouTube channel called xkcd's What If?, where he first uploaded on November 29 of the same year.

[55] In November 2012, Munroe published a comic entitled "Two Years", reflecting on their relationship since his wife's breast cancer diagnosis.