Moore did his undergraduate studies at
Northwestern University, graduating in 1986.[1] He earned his Ph.D. in 1991 from
Cornell University under the supervision of
Philip Holmes.[2] After postdoctoral studies at the Santa Fe Institute, he joined the institute as a research faculty member in 1998, and moved to the University of New Mexico in 2000 as an assistant professor. He received tenure there in 2005. In 2007 he became a research professor at the Santa Fe Institute again, while retaining his University of New Mexico affiliation, and in 2008 he was promoted to full professor at UNM. His primary appointment was in the Department of Computer Science, with a joint appointment in the UNM Department of Physics and Astronomy. In 2012, Moore left the University of New Mexico and became full-time resident faculty at the
Santa Fe Institute.[1]
In 1993, Moore found a novel solution to the
three-body problem, showing that it is possible in
Newtonian mechanics for three equal-mass bodies to follow each other around a shared orbit along a figure-eight shaped curve.[4] Moore's results were found through numerical computations, and they were made mathematically rigorous in 2000 by
Alain Chenciner and Richard Montgomery and shown computationally to be
stable by Carlès Simo. Later researchers showed that similar solutions to the three-body problem are also possible under
general relativity, Einstein's more accurate description of the effects of gravitation on moving bodies. After his original work on the problem, Moore collaborated with Michael Nauenberg to find many complex orbits for systems of more than three bodies, including one system in which twelve bodies trace out the four equatorial cycles of a
cuboctahedron.[5][6][7][8]
In 2001, Moore and John M. Robson showed that the problem of tiling one
polyomino with copies of another is
NP-complete.[9][10]
Moore has also been active in the field of
network science, with many notable publications in the field. In work with
Aaron Clauset,
David Kempe, and
Dimitris Achlioptas, Moore showed that the appearance of
power laws in the
degree distribution of
networks can be illusory: network models such as the
Erdős–Rényi model, whose degree distribution does not obey a power law, may nevertheless appear to exhibit one when measured using
traceroute-like tools.[11][12] In work with Clauset and
Mark Newman, Moore developed a probabilistic model of
hierarchical clustering for complex networks, and showed that their model predicts clustering robustly in the face of changes to the link structure of the network.[13][14][15][16]