James Howard coat of arms

A Mathematician, a Different Kind of Mathematician, and a Statistician

What I Do

I use mathematics, statistics, software, and artificial intelligence to understand complicated systems—and explain what they mean when people and institutions have to make decisions.

Explore by Subject

Follow the ideas across writing, scholarship, books, software, teaching, and service.

  • Artificial Intelligence

    Machines that choose, predict, classify, and speak—and the institutions that must decide what to do with them.

  • Mathematics & Statistics

    Probability, statistics, numerical methods, and the computational tools that turn quantitative ideas into work.

  • Operations Research & Decision Systems

    Models, constrained resources, complex organizations, and decisions that remain necessary even when the evidence is incomplete.

  • Risk & Resilience

    Hazards, forecasts, resilience, and the stubborn gap between measuring danger and deciding what to do about it.

  • Public Policy & Institutions

    Government, public money, institutional design, and the mechanisms through which collective choices acquire consequences.

  • Software & Open Systems

    Programs, protocols, open systems, and the long practical history of making machines do one useful thing correctly.

  • Heraldry & Visual Identity

    Arms, badges, seals, livery, and the visual systems through which people and institutions make identity recognizable.

  • Teaching & Learning

    Mathematics, technical education, online learning, and the work of helping people understand machinery rather than merely operate it.

Browse the Work

Choose the kind of record you want to explore.

  • Writing

    Selected essays, subjects, and series drawn from the complete Blog archive.

  • Scholarship

    Scholarly work and the complete research record.

  • Books

    Long-form work in mathematics, policy, operations research, and teaching.

  • Software

    Open-source projects and working tools built around difficult problems.

  • Teaching

    Courses, instructional work, and a documentary syllabus archive.

  • Service

    Public work, professional stewardship, and institutional responsibility.

Have a complicated problem of your own? Consulting →

Elsewhere on the Site

Personal archives, historical records, and a few less conventional corners.

  • Ancestry

    Documented lineages, people, places, and the evidence connecting them.

  • Honors

    Awards, appointments, decorations, and other recognition.

  • Coat of Arms

    The grant, insignia, emblazonments, tartan, and documentary record.

  • Media Archive

    Interviews, quotations, profiles, and appearances collected over the years.

From the Blog

The latest entries from the complete chronological archive.

Sep 20, 2026

How a Racing Stripe Became a Language

In 1967 the U.S. Coast Guard adopted a new diagonal "racing stripe." Within a generation, coast guards around the world were speaking variations of the same visual language.

Sep 10, 2026

GitHub's Ongoing Actions Outage

I have two little production systems running in GitHub Actions. One, Krigsbot, wakes up every morning, looks for environmental and polar news, makes some editorial decisions, and queues a day's worth of…

Sep 3, 2026

The Sky Is Falling

The BBC published a story this morning about the Netherlands moving part of its national gold reserve from North America to London. BBC article Ordinarily, this would not be particularly exciting. Central…