Cosma Shalizi

• Cosma Rohilla Shalizi is a statistician in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, which he joined as an assistant professor in August 2006.
• Trained as a physicist, he worked at the Santa Fe Institute and the University of Michigan's Center for the Study of Complex Systems before that.
• He co-wrote the CSSR algorithm for extracting Markov models from time series, and writes the Three-Toed Sloth weblog, book reviews and notebooks on more than 400 topics on his site.

Key facts

Current role

Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University, which he joined as an assistant professor in August 20061

Born

28 February 1974, Boston; grew up in Bethesda, Maryland1

Education

Bachelor's degree in physics, University of California, Berkeley; PhD in physics, University of Wisconsin–Madison (May 2001)1

Earlier

Santa Fe Institute from 1998 to 2002 (Evolving Cellular Automata Project; Computation, Dynamics and Inference group); Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan, from 2002 to 20051

Research

Co-author of the CSSR algorithm, which extracts Markov models from time-series data without assuming a parametric form1

Writing

The Three-Toed Sloth weblog; notebooks on more than 400 topics; The Bactra Review, about 130 book reviews2

31 Oct 2026Last checked against its sources today

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