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Stephen Wolfram
Photo: Stephen Wolfram's PR team/Stephen Faust, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons29

Stephen Wolfram

British-American scientist (born 1959)

Stephen Wolfram ( WUUL-frəm; born 29 August 1959) is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He works in computer algebra and theoretical physics.2

From Wikipedia’s article on Stephen Wolfram (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born Aug 29, 1959.1

About

In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

As a businessman, Wolfram is the founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research, where he works as chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine.

From Wikipedia’s article on Stephen Wolfram, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2

Companies

Early life and education

  • Date not recordedSt John's College3
  • Date not recordedEton College3
  • Date not recordedUniversity of Oxford3
  • Date not recordedDragon School3
  • Date not recordedCalifornia Institute of Technology3

Education

Wolfram was educated at Eton College, but left prematurely in 1976. As a young child, Wolfram had difficulties learning arithmetic. He entered St. John's College, Oxford, at age 17 and left in 1978 without graduating to attend the California Institute of Technology the following year, where he received a PhD in particle physics in 1980. Wolfram's thesis committee was composed of Richard Feynman, Peter Goldreich, Frank J. Sciulli, and Steven Frautschi, and chaired by Richard D. Field.

From Wikipedia’s article on Stephen Wolfram (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Career

Occupation: merchant, university teacher, computer scientist, patent inventor, businessperson, artificial intelligence researcher, mathematician, physicist.9

  • Date not recordedWorked at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign4
  • Date not recordedFounded Wolfram Research5
  • Date not recordedFounded Touch Press6
  • Date not recordedFounded Wolfram Physics Project7
  • Date not recordedChief executive officer8

Known for: Wolfram Language, Mathematica, A New Kind of Science.10

Early career

Wolfram, at the age of 15, began research in applied quantum field theory and particle physics and published scientific papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals; by the time he left Oxford, he had published ten such papers. After completing his PhD at just 20 years old, Wolfram joined the faculty at Caltech and became the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, at age 21.

Later career

Complex systems and cellular automata

In 1983, Wolfram left for the School of Natural Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. By that time, he was no longer interested in particle physics. Instead, he began pursuing investigations into cellular automata, mainly with computer simulations. He produced a series of papers investigating the class of elementary cellular automata, conceiving the Wolfram code, a naming system for one-dimensional cellular automata, and a classification scheme for the complexity of their behaviour. He conjectured that the Rule 110 cellular automaton might be Turing complete, which a research assistant to Wolfram, Matthew Cook, later proved correct. Wolfram sued Cook and temporarily blocked publication of the work on Rule 110 for allegedly violating a non-disclosure agreement until Wolfram could publish the work in his controversial book A New Kind of Science. Wolfram's cellular-automata work came to be cited in more than 10,000 papers.

In the mid-1980s, Wolfram worked on simulations of physical processes (such as turbulent fluid flow) with cellular automata on the Connection Machine alongside Richard Feynman and helped initiate the field of complex systems. In 1984, he was a participant in the Founding Workshops of the Santa Fe Institute, along with Nobel laureates Murray Gell-Mann, Manfred Eigen, and Philip Warren Anderson, and future laureate Frank Wilczek. In 1986, he founded the Center for Complex Systems Research (CCSR) at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. In 1987, he founded the journal Complex Systems.

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Symbolic Manipulation Program

Wolfram led the development of the computer algebra system SMP (Symbolic Manipulation Program) in the Caltech physics department during 1979–1981. A dispute with the administration over the intellectual property rights regarding SMP—patents, copyright, and faculty involvement in commercial ventures—eventually led him to resign from Caltech. SMP was further developed and marketed commercially by Inference Corp. of Los Angeles during 1983–1988.

Mathematica

In 1986, Wolfram left the Institute for Advanced Study for the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where he had founded their Center for Complex Systems Research, and started to develop the computer algebra system Mathematica, which was released on 23 June 1988, when he left academia. In 1987, he founded Wolfram Research, which continues to develop and market the program.

A New Kind of Science

From 1992 to 2002, Wolfram worked on his book A New Kind of Science, which presents an empirical study of simple computational systems. It argues that for fundamental reasons these types of systems, rather than traditional mathematics, are needed to model and understand complexity in nature. Wolfram's conclusion is that the universe is discrete in its nature, and runs on fundamental laws that can be described as simple programs. He predicts that a realization of this within scientific communities will have a revolutionary influence on physics, chemistry, biology, and most other scientific areas, hence the book's title. The book was met with skepticism and criticism that Wolfram took credit for the work of others and made conclusions without evidence to support them.

Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine

In March 2009, Wolfram announced Wolfram Alpha, an answer engine. Wolfram Alpha launched in May 2009, and a paid-for version with extra features launched in February 2012 that was met with criticism for its high price, which later dropped from $50 to $2. The engine is based on natural language processing and a large library of rules-based algorithms. The application programming interface allows other applications to extend and enhance Wolfram Alpha.

Touchpress

In 2010, Wolfram co-founded Touchpress with Theodore Gray, Max Whitby, and John Cromie. The company specialised in creating premium apps and games covering a wide range of educational subjects designed for children, parents, students, and educators. Touchpress published more than 100 apps. The company is no longer active.

Wolfram Language

In March 2014, at the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) event, Wolfram officially announced the Wolfram Language as a new general multi-paradigm programming language, though it was previously available through Mathematica and not an entirely new programming language. The documentation for the language was pre-released in October 2013 to coincide with the bundling of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language on every Raspberry Pi computer with some controversy because of the proprietary nature of the Wolfram Language. While the Wolfram Language has existed for over 30 years as the primary programming language used in Mathematica, it was not officially named until 2014, and is not widely used.

Wolfram Physics Project

In April 2020, Wolfram announced the "Wolfram Physics Project" as an effort to reduce and explain all the laws of physics within a paradigm of a hypergraph that is transformed by minimal rewriting rules that obey the Church–Rosser property. The effort is a continuation of the ideas he originally described in A New Kind of Science. Wolfram claims that "From an extremely simple model, we're able to reproduce special relativity, general relativity and the core results of quantum mechanics."

Physicists are generally unimpressed with Wolfram's claim, and say his results are non-quantitative and arbitrary.

From Wikipedia’s article on Stephen Wolfram (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Personal life

  • BornAug 29, 1959, London11
  • CitizenshipUnited Kingdom, United States12 13
  • ResidenceCambridge, Concord14
  • SpouseElise Ellen Cawley15
  • Children316 17

Family

Stephen Wolfram was born in London in 1959 to Hugo and Sybil Wolfram, both German Jewish refugees to the United Kingdom. His maternal grandmother was British psychoanalyst Kate Friedlander.

Wolfram's father, Hugo Wolfram, was a textile manufacturer and served as managing director of the Lurex Company—makers of the fabric Lurex. Wolfram's mother, Sybil Wolfram, was a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall, a constituent college of the University of Oxford, from 1964 to 1993.

Wolfram was married to mathematician Elise Cawley until her death in 2026. They have four children together.

From Wikipedia’s article on Stephen Wolfram (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Awards

  • 2023Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences18 20
  • 2013Fellow of the American Mathematical Society18 19
  • 2009Friedrich L. Bauer Prize18
  • 1981MacArthur Fellows Program18

Sources

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