Stephen Wolfram is a
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
scientistA scientist in a broad sense is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge. In a more restricted sense, a scientist is an individual who uses the scientific method. The person may be an expert in one or more areas of science. This article focuses on the more restricted use of the word...
and the chief designer of the
MathematicaMathematica is a computational software program used in scientific, engineering, and mathematical fields and other areas of technical computing...
software application and the
Wolfram AlphaWolfram Alpha is an answer-engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might...
computational knowledge engine.
Biography
Stephen Wolfram's parents were Jewish refugees who emigrated from
WestphaliaWestphalia is a region in Germany, centred on the cities of Arnsberg, Bielefeld, Dortmund, Minden and Münster.Westphalia is roughly the region between the rivers Rhine and Weser, located north and south of the Ruhr River. No exact definition of borders can be given, because the name "Westphalia"...
, Germany, to England in 1933. Wolfram's father Hugo was a textile manufacturer and novelist (
Into a Neutral Country) and his mother Sybil was a professor of
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
at the
University of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
. He has a younger brother,
ConradConrad Wolfram is a British technologist and businessman known for his work in information technology and its application.- Work :Conrad Wolfram founded Wolfram Research Europe Ltd. in 1991 and remains its managing director...
.
Wolfram was educated at
EtonEton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....
, where he amazed and frustrated teachers by his brilliance and refusal to be taught, instead doing other students' maths homework for money. Wolfram published an article on
particle physicsParticle physics is a branch of physics that studies the existence and interactions of particles that are the constituents of what is usually referred to as matter or radiation. In current understanding, particles are excitations of quantum fields and interact following their dynamics...
but claimed to be bored and left Eton prematurely in 1976. He entered
St John's College, Oxford__FORCETOC__St John's College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford, one of the larger Oxford colleges with approximately 390 undergraduates, 200 postgraduates and over 100 academic staff. It was founded by Sir Thomas White, a merchant, in 1555, whose heart is buried in the chapel of...
at age 17 but found lectures "awful". Working independently, Wolfram published a widely cited paper on heavy
quarkA quark is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. Due to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never directly...
production at age 18 and nine other papers before leaving in 1978 without graduating. He received a
Ph.D.Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
in particle physics from the
California Institute of TechnologyThe California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...
at age 20, joined the faculty there and received one of the first
MacArthur awardsThe MacArthur Fellows Program or MacArthur Fellowship is an award given by the John D. and Catherine T...
in 1981, at age 21.
Wolfram's work with Geoffrey Fox on the theory of the
strong interactionIn theoretical physics, quantum chromodynamics is a theory of the strong interaction , a fundamental force describing the interactions of the quarks and gluons making up hadrons . It is the study of the SU Yang–Mills theory of color-charged fermions...
is still used today in experimental particle physics. He founded the journal
Complex SystemsComplex Systems is an interdisciplinary scientific journal. Its subject matter of complex systems ranges across a number of more narrow scientific and engineering fields....
in 1987. Wolfram is married to a mathematician and has four children.
Symbolic Manipulation Program
Wolfram led the development of the
computer algebra systemA computer algebra system is a software program that facilitates symbolic mathematics. The core functionality of a CAS is manipulation of mathematical expressions in symbolic form.-Symbolic manipulations:...
SMP (
Symbolic Manipulation ProgramSymbolic Manipulation Program, usually called SMP, was a computer algebra system designed by Chris A. Cole and Stephen Wolfram at Caltech circa 1979 and initially developed in the Caltech physics department under Wolfram's leadership with contributions from Geoffrey C. Fox, Jeffrey M. Greif, Eric...
) in the Caltech physics department during 1979–1981. A dispute with the administration over the
intellectual propertyIntellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...
rights regarding SMP—patents, copyright, 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 1983–1988.
Cellular automata
In 1983, Wolfram left for the School of Natural Sciences of the
Institute for Advanced StudyThe Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is an independent postgraduate center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner...
, where he studied
cellular automataA cellular automaton is a discrete model studied in computability theory, mathematics, physics, complexity science, theoretical biology and microstructure modeling. It consists of a regular grid of cells, each in one of a finite number of states, such as "On" and "Off"...
, mainly with computer simulations. He produced a series of papers systematically investigating the class of
elementary cellular automataIn mathematics and computability theory, an elementary cellular automaton is a one-dimensional cellular automaton where there are two possible states and the rule to determine the state of a cell in the next generation depends only on the current state of the cell and its two immediate neighbors....
, conceiving the
Wolfram codeWolfram code is a naming system often used for one-dimensional cellular automaton rules, introduced by Stephen Wolfram in a 1983 paper and used in his book A New Kind of Science....
, a naming system for one-dimensional cellular automata, and a classification scheme for the complexity of their behavior. He conjectured that the Rule 110 cellular automaton may be Turing complete. In the middle 1980s Wolfram worked on simulations of physical processes (such as
turbulent fluid flowIn fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is a flow regime characterized by chaotic and stochastic property changes. This includes low momentum diffusion, high momentum convection, and rapid variation of pressure and velocity in space and time...
) with cellular automata on the
Connection MachineThe Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis' research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation...
alongside
Richard FeynmanRichard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics...
.
Mathematica
In 1986 Wolfram left the
Institute for Advanced StudyThe Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is an independent postgraduate center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner...
for the
University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignThe University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
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.
A New Kind of Science
From 1992 to 2002, he worked on his controversial book
A New Kind of ScienceA New Kind of Science is a book by Stephen Wolfram, published in 2002. It contains an empirical and systematic study of computational systems such as cellular automata...
, which presents an empirical study of very 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 digital in its nature, and runs on fundamental laws which can be described as simple programs. 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 book in 2002, Wolfram has split his time between developing Mathematica and encouraging people to get involved with the subject matter of
A New Kind of Science by giving talks, holding conferences, and starting a summer school devoted to the topic.
Computational knowledge engine
In March 2009, Wolfram announced Wolfram|Alpha, an answer engine with a new approach to
knowledge extractionKnowledge Extraction is the creation of knowledge from structured and unstructured sources. The resulting knowledge needs to be in a machine-readable and machine-interpretable format and must represent knowledge in a manner that facilitates inferencing...
and an easy-to-use interface, launched on May 16, 2009. The engine is based on
natural language processingNatural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....
, a large library of algorithms and answers queries using the approach described in
A New Kind of Science. The
application programming interfaceAn application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
(API) allows other applications to extend and enhance Alpha.
External links