About Nick Berry

Nicholas “Nick” Berry · 9 August 1967 – 8 October 2022

DataGenetics was Nick Berry’s blog. From 2009 to 2022 he wrote more than 450 articles here about puzzles, probability, games, data and mathematics, explaining each one with his own diagrams, simulations and a lot of humour. Nick died in Seattle on 8 October 2022, aged 55. This site is kept online as an archive of his writing.

Nick was born in Leeds, England. He was educated as a rocket scientist and aircraft designer, graduating with a Master’s degree in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering.

After graduating, he joined a group of friends who had started a software company, NextBase Ltd, specializing in electronic mapping and route planning. NextBase grew organically and earned an unprecedented number of awards and accolades, including the British Design Award and The Queen’s Award for Technology, presented by Her Majesty in 1991. In 1994 Nick was recognized by the Sunday Times Magazine as “one of the top 50 entrepreneurs of the decade”. That same year, with the company grown to 50 people worldwide, NextBase was sold to Microsoft.

Nick moved to Seattle with the sale and spent 14 years at Microsoft, the last ten of them in the Microsoft Casual Games team. During his time there he filed a variety of patents and represented Microsoft at conferences and speaking engagements. After Microsoft he joined RealNetworks as GM of customer analytics for its games division, GameHouse, and then spent five years as a data scientist at Facebook in Seattle.

Alongside his engineering work, Nick cared deeply about data privacy. He held the CIPP qualification from the International Association of Privacy Professionals and spoke regularly about the legal and ethical sides of collecting, using and destroying data.

In July 2013 he gave a TEDx Seattle talk on Passwords and the Internet. In 2015 GeekWire named him Geek of the Week, and in 2019 he was recognized as one of the 50 over 50 in the video games industry.

In June 2019 Nick shared some sad news: he had been diagnosed with stage IV cancer. He stepped back from work but kept writing whenever his strength allowed, because, as he put it, writing gave him “pleasure, pride, and purpose”. He also offered to give back by visiting universities to talk about data science and coding. His last article, Perimeter Puzzle, was published in July 2022.

Thank you for reading his work. Every article is listed on the blog index.