Steve Olson is an American writer who specializes in science, mathematics, and public policy.
He is the author of several nonfiction trade books: Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2002; Count Down: Six Kids Vie for Glory at the World’s Toughest Math Competition in 2004; Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God in 2010; Eruption: The Untold Story of Mt.
However, a more formal version of the conjecture was proven by the author, working with coauthors Douglas Rohde and Joseph Chang, in a September 30, 2004, article in Nature.
[2] They modeled the human population as a set of randomly mating subpopulations that are connected by occasional migrants.
In an article published in the Los Angeles Times on the day the movie The Da Vinci Code was released, Olson pointed to several other consequences of the analysis in the Nature paper.