Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram (born 29 August 1959) is a British-American metamathematician, mathematician, computer scientist, physicist, and businessman.

He is known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and theoretical physics.

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 at University of Oxford from 1964 to 1993.

Stephen Wolfram is married to a mathematician.

They have four children together.

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.

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 including Nuclear Physics B, Australian Journal of Physics, Nuovo Cimento, and Physical Review D.

Working independently, Wolfram published a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 18 and nine other papers.

Wolfram's work with Geoffrey C. Fox on the theory of the strong interaction is still used in experimental particle physics.

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.

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.

Following his PhD, Wolfram joined the faculty at Caltech and became the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, at age 21.

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 systematically 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.

SMP was further developed and marketed commercially by Inference Corp. of Los Angeles during 1983–1988.

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 at Urbana–Champaign.

In 1987, he founded the journal Complex Systems.

In 1987, he founded Wolfram Research, which continues to develop and market the program.

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

From 1992 to 2002, Wolfram worked on his controversial book A New Kind of Science, which presents an empirical study of simple computational systems.

Additionally, 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 which 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 a majority of scientific areas in general, 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.

In March 2009, Wolfram announced Wolfram Alpha, an answer engine.

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

As a businessman, he 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.