Matthew White has worked as a law librarian for the past twenty years. In 1997 he began his online Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century, which won several awards in the early days of the internet. His database of atrocity statistics has become the most popular and widely cited section of the Atlas. Over the years, he has corresponded with many scholars, such as Steven Pinker and Martin Gilbert, and his research has been cited by forty-five published books and over eighty scholarly articles. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.