Visit my shop for lots of cool things you probably didn't know you could buy from an author-type person, including periodic table quilts, posters, and even books!
Available now my new Periodic Table of Tools!
You need this poster!
Tools is my newest book: you’re going to want it to go along with the poster.
Hi there, you have arrived at the home page of Theodore Gray, BAFTA and IgNobel winning author of The Elements, A Visual Exploration (and several other books you should read), Founder of Touchpress (an App publishing company) and co-founder of Wolfram Research, Inc (makers of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha).
My Tools book is now available! It’s the third in my series of books about mechanical things that started with How Things Work and Engines.
If you’re a chemistry fan, don’t worry, all my chemistry-related books are still available, and I still love them just as much.
Also available now, 8-foot-wide periodic table quilts, and Molecule Quilts, very reasonably priced!
I wear several professional hats, and there are links below to the websites that represent each of them. I have one blog for general things and a stitchblog to cover things related to quilting and embroidery.
My newest endeavor is making (and selling) what I call "Mechanical GIFs". These are small laser-cut acrylic models of mechanical devices, designed to have the same sort of explanatory power as the animated gifs you often see on the internet. They are highly simplified, stylized versions of the devices, flattened and made, as I like to say, transparently obvious. Check out mechanicalgifs.com for more about this enterprise.
My most elaborate personal obsession has resulted in a website (periodictable.com), the books (The Elements, Molecules, and Reactions) with about a million and a half copies in print and millions more in App form, a Popular Science magazine column that ran for ten years, and numerous spinoff products including posters, card decks, puzzles, and so on. All of which started from a misunderstanding. It's even led to a decades-long collaboration with Max Whitby producing beautiful periodic table museum displays.
UrbanaLaser.com is an offshoot of my work on mechanicalgifs.com. Under the Urbana Laser umbrella we offer laser cutting services to the local (Urbana-Champaign, Illinois) community using our large-format 130W, 51" x 35" working area CO2 laser cutter.
My most difficult to understand project is PaleGray Labs, a collaboration with the artist and film maker Nina Paley. Together we create embroidered and quilted movies using techniques far beyond the usual.
Read my Stitchblog, or try our live Stitchcam, a webcam pointed at our quilting robot.
In 2010, responding to the success of The Elements on the iPad, my partners Max Whitby, John Cromie and I decided to form Touchpress, which was for a time the leading super-premium App producer, makers of, for example, Disney Animated (2013 Apple iPad App of the Year, and winner of the 2014 BAFTA Children's Interactive award) which I also authored. (The company is now an imprint of the app publisher StoryToys.)
Maribel’s Masks was our response to the great virus of 2020. Maribel started making masks, and together we made it into a business which made the finest cloth masks available anywhere, with hundreds of options including straw holes and silk liners. But not anymore.
My first real job came from co-founding, with Stephen Wolfram and a few others, the technical computing company Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha. I wrote the Notebook user interface for Mathematica and led the user interface group for over 20 years. (But you can tell from the name of the company who the principal founder was!)
Other Theo Grays
If you're looking for the Theo Gray who is a web designer in the UK, go to theogray.com. If you're looking for one of the other Theo/Theodore Grays in the world, try a Facebook search for everyone named Theo Gray. Oh, and if you find the one who keeps getting arrested for petty theft, please tell him to stop, it messes up my google news feed. And if you're the one who's in trouble for shady lobster fishing, I have to hand it to you, that's a unique way to besmirch our shared reputation. Keep up the good work, but maybe get a license next time?