Fink was born in Plattsburgh, New York, later moving to San Antonio, Texas. He studied physics at Caltech, where he won the annual Fisher Prize in Physics, and at St John's College, Cambridge/Theory of Condensed Matter, where he was supervised by Robin Ball. He was a Junior Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and did a Postdoctorate at École Normale Supérieure, Paris. He now occupies his present CNRS position.

Fink is a researcher in theoretical physics. He published his first paper in the journal Science at the age of 20 while at Caltech. He received his PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in 1998. Fink's current research interests include discrete dynamics, networks and biologically inspired problems in statistical mechanics.

Selected Papers

• Thomas M. A. Fink and Robin C. Ball, 'How Many Conformations Can a Protein Remember?', Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 198103 (2001).
• Thomas M. Fink and Yong Mao, 'Designing Tie Knots by Random Walks', Nature, 398, 31 (1999).
• B. T. Werner and T. M. Fink, 'Beach Cusps as Self-Organized Patterns', Science 260, 968 (1993).

The Man's Book (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006; Orion, 2007; Little, Brown, 2009) is a handbook of men customs, habits and pursuits. It is organized by subject, with chapters on health, dress, sports, outdoors, drinking, eating and others. It is in some respects similar to The Dangerous Book for Boys, but for men and with more of the feel of an almanac. The Man's Book has been reviewed in The Times (UK), the Literary Review, the New Statesman, and other periodicals, and has been translated into German, Italian, Russian and other languages.

The author treats each section in the book in a uniform way: he dedicates at most three or four pages to it, and within that space tries to summarize the essentials as completely (and densely) as possible. For instance, the section on beer explains the different beer styles, lists popular beers from around the world, and gives advice on what beers go best with which foods.

The book was designed by the author, and was written so that each section finishes on the last line of a page. This effect does not survive translation, however.

The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie, (with Yong Mao, Fourth Estate, London, 1999) is a cultural, historical and mathematical examination of ties and tie knots.The book includes a layman's account of the authors' mathematical papers which derived all possible knots capable of being tied with a standard necktie.

It has been published in 10 languages.

In May 2009 IntuApps, a New York Iphone application developer, and Little, Brown released an iphone application inspired by The Man's Book.The app hit the No. 1 spot in the Apple App Store, with over 1 million downloads, on 23 May 2009, according to the IntuApps website and Little, Brown.