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Stephen Wolfram
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Stephen Wolfram (born 29 August 1959 in London) is a British physicist, mathematician and businessman known for his work in theoretical particle physics, cosmology, cellular automata, complexity theory, and computer algebra.
hen Wolfram's parents were Jewish refugees who immigrated from Westphalia to England in 1933. Wolfram's father, Hugo Wolfram, was a novelist, and his mother, Sybil Wolfram, was a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. Wolfram was educated at Eton public school.
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Stephen Wolfram (born 29 August 1959 in London) is a British physicist, mathematician and businessman known for his work in theoretical particle physics, cosmology, cellular automata, complexity theory, and computer algebra.
Biography
Stephen Wolfram's parents were Jewish refugees who immigrated from Westphalia to England in 1933. Wolfram's father, Hugo Wolfram, was a novelist, and his mother, Sybil Wolfram, was a professor of philosophy at the University of 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 wrote a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 17.
He received his Ph.D. in particle physics from Caltech at age 20 and joined the faculty there. He became highly interested in cellular automata at age 21. His work with Geoffrey Fox on the theory of the strong interaction is still used today in experimental particle physics.
Stephen Wolfram was in 1987 founding editor of the journal Complex systems.
Work
Symbolic Manipulation Program
Wolfram 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 a dispute with the administration over the intellectual property rights regarding SMP—patents/copyrights and faculty involvement in commercial ventures—eventually caused him to resign from Caltech. 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. 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. In the middle 1980s Wolfram worked on simulations of physical processes (such as turbulent fluid flow) with cellular automata on the Connection Machine alongside Richard Feynman.
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 called Wolfram Research which continues to develop and market the program. Stephen Wolfram is currently the majority shareholder.
A New Kind of Science
From 1992 to 2002, he 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. Wolfram's conclusion is that the universe is digital in its nature, and runs on fundamental laws which can be described as simple computer programs; cellular automata. He predicts a realization of this within the scientific communities will have a major and revolutionary influence on physics, chemistry and biology and the majority of the scientific areas in general, which is the reason for the book's title.
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.
The simplest Universal Turing machine
In the NKS book, Wolfram claimed to have found the simplest known Universal Turing machine, one with 2 states and 5 colors. Afterwards, Wolfram made an empirical investigation of 2,985,984 (= 126) possible 2-state 3-color Turing machines (because it was known that no machine with 2 states and 2 colors can be universal), and from among these candidates he selected one that he had an intuition might indeed be the simplest universal Turing machine.
A US$25,000 prize was announced to be awarded to the first person or group who would provide a formal proof that that particular candidate is universal or that it is not. Alex Smith, a 20-year-old undergraduate from Birmingham, UK, claimed to have proven the universality of Wolfram's 2,3 Turing machine and was awarded the prize. Computer scientist Vaughan Pratt later claimed to have found an error in the reasoning of the proof. Wolfram Research and Alex Smith disputed Pratt's claim on the same discussion group.
Computational knowledge engine
In March 2009, Wolfram announced Wolfram|Alpha, a computational data engine with a new approach to knowledge extraction and an easy-to-use interface, to be launched in May 2009. The engine is based on natural language processing, a large library of algorithms and an NKS approach to answering queries. The Wolfram|Alpha engine differs from traditional search engines in that it does not simply return a list of results based on a query, but instead computes an answer. Nova Spivack opined that "it could be as important as Google".
Further reading
- by Stephen Wolfram; MIT
- by Rudy Rucker, a book that presents NKS ideas
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External links
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