He received a B.S. in
Computer Science and
Mathematics from
Yale University in May 1996, where he was the technician for campus humor magazine
The Yale Record. His undergraduate thesis was "The Geometry of Critical Ising Clusters", under the direction of
Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of
fractal geometry. He then worked at the IBM Watson Research Center in the theoretical physics department, and began graduate study at
Stanford University in 1996. He received his PhD from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 under the direction of
Gerald Sussman: his thesis topic was " Diversity of Evolving Systems: Scaling and Dynamics of Genealogical Trees " He then joined the
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at
Princeton University as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of
Simon A. Levin, the Moffett professor of biology in 2005, and was in that position at his early death. His hobby of collecting place names led Rauch to found
MetaCarta with John Frank and Doug Brenhouse. Using MetaCarta's software, Rauch developed maps like the four below for fun. Rauch was an inventor of spatial information processing systems. He founded several organizations, including • ALife •
TerraShare •
MetaCarta He proposed an approach for car-free neighborhoods to the zoning board of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He died in a hiking accident in California's
Sequoia National Park at age 31. ==Published works related to biological diversity==