Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram (born August 29, 1959 in London) is a scientist known for his work in theoretical particle physics, cellular automata and computer algebra, and is the creator of the computer program Mathematica.

Early life

Wolfram's father, Hugo Wolfram, was a novelist and his mother, Sybil Wolfram, was a professor of philosophy at Oxford. Wolfram was educated at Eton public school. Often described as a child prodigy, he published an article on particle physics at age 16 and entered Oxford University (St John's College) at age 17. He received his Ph.D. in particle physics from Caltech at age 20 and joined the faculty there.

Professional life

He led the development of the computer algebra system SMP (Symbolic Manipulation Program: SMP was essentially Version Zero of Mathematica) in the Caltech physics department during 1979–1981, but the school's patent rules (perhaps more accurately: viewpoint of patents asserted after the fact) led to extensive legal wrangles with Caltech administration over his intellectual property rights. (SMP was further developed and marketed commercially by Inference Corp. of Los Angeles during the period 1983–1988.) In 1981, Wolfram was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, not for any single achievement, but for the breadth of his work. In 1983, he left for the School of Natural Sciences of the Institute For Advanced Study, where he studied cellular automata, mainly with computer simulations.

Mathematica

In 1986 Wolfram left the Institute for Advanced Study for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he founded their Center for Complex Systems Research and started to develop the computer algebra system Mathematica, which was first released in 1988, when he left academia. In 1987 he co-founded a company Wolfram Research, which continues to extend the program and market it with success. As of today Stephen Wolfram is the majority shareholder.

A New Kind of Science

From 1992 to 2002, Wolfram worked on his controversial book A New Kind of Science (NKS), which presents an empirical study of very simple computational systems. Additionally, it argued that for fundamental reasons these types of systems, rather than traditional mathematics, are needed to model and understand complexity in nature.

Since the release of the NKS book in 2002, Wolfram has split his time between developing Mathematica and encouraging people to get involved with NKS by giving talks, holding NKS conferences, and starting an NKS summer school.

External links

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Stephen Wolfram

Early life

Professional life

Mathematica

A New Kind of Science

External links