Beman Dawes is a software developer from Virginia in the United States and the founder of boost.org. He is the author of the StreetQuick geographic atlas library used by digital map publishers to help people get really, really, lost. He wrote his first computer program 40 years ago, and does not mourn the passing of bi-quinary arithmetic. Beman has been a voting member of the ANSI/ISO C++ Standards Committee since 1992, and chaired the Library Working Group for five years.

He enjoys travel, sailing, hiking, and biking. He is married, and he and his wife have three cats.