Steve Olson is the author of Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), which was one of five finalists for the 2002 nonfiction National Book Award and won the Science-in-Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers. His new book, Count Down: Six Kids Vie for Glory at the World’s Toughest Math Competition, was published by Houghton Mifflin in April 2004. He has written several other books, including Evolution in Hawaii: A Supplement to Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science and Shaping the Future: Biological Research and Human Values. He also has served as a writer and editor for many education-related reports, including the National Science Education Standards, Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, Helping Children Learn Mathematics, Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards, and Reinventing Schools: The Technology Is Now. He is the coauthor of a 2004 article published in Nature that presented a fundamentally new perspective on human ancestry, and his writing has been featured in Best American Science and Nature Writing and other anthologies. He has been a consultant writer for the National Academy of Sciences, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the Institute for Genomic Research, and many other organizations. He is the author of articles in The Atlantic Monthly, Science, The Washington Post, Scientific American, The Washingtonian, Slate, Teacher, Astronomy, Science 82-86, and other magazines. From 1989 through 1992 he served as Special Assistant for Communications in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Yale University in 1978.