Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram born in London in 1959 to Hugo and Sybil Wolfram, both German Jewish refugees to the United Kingdom. age 60
He is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and in theoretical physics In 2012, he was named an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, the author of A New Kind of Science, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research.

Stephen Wolfram published his first scientific paper at the age of 15 and received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of 20. Having started to use computers in 1973, Wolfram rapidly became a leader in the emerging field of scientific computing.

In 1981 Wolfram became the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship. He then set out on an ambitious new direction in science aimed at understanding the origins of complexity in nature. Wolfram’s first key idea was to use computer experiments to study the behavior of simple computer programs known as cellular automata. This allowed him to make a series of startling discoveries about the origins of complexity.

Wolfram founded the first research center and the first journal in the field, Complex Systems, and began the development of Mathematica. Wolfram Research soon became a world leader in the software industry — widely recognized for excellence in both technology and business.

Following the release of Mathematica Version 2 in 1991, Wolfram began to divide his time between Mathematica development and scientific research. Building on his work from the mid-1980s, and now with Mathematica as a tool, Wolfram made a rapid succession of major new discoveries, which he described in his book, A New Kind of Science.

Building on Mathematica, A New Kind of Science, and the success of Wolfram Research, Wolfram recently launched Wolfram|Alpha — an ambitious, long-term project to make as much of the world’s knowledge as possible computable, and accessible to everyone.
Stephen Wolfram is married to a mathematician. They have four children together.
Education
As a young child, Wolfram had difficulties learning arithmetic At the age of 12, he wrote a dictionary on physics. By 13 or 14, he had written three books on particle physics.
Wolfram was educated at Eton College, but left prematurely in 1976 He entered St. John’s College, Oxford at age 17 but found lectures “awful”, and left in 1978 without graduating to attend the California Institute of Technology, the following year, where he received a Ph.D. in particle physics on 19 November 1979 at age 20. 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. Topics included matter creation and annihilation, the fundamental interactions, elementary particles and their currents, hadronic and leptonic physics, and the parton model, published in professional peer-reviewed scientific journals including Nuclear Physics B, Australian Journal of Physics, Nuovo Cimento, and Physical review. Working independently, Wolfram published a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 18 and nine other papers and continued research and to publish on particle physics into his early twenties. Wolfram’s work with Geoffrey C. Fox on the theory of the strong interaction is still used in experimental particle physics.
A 1981 letter from Feynman to Gerald Freund giving a reference for Wolfram for the MacArthur grant appears in Feynman’s collected letters, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. Following his Ph.D.
, Wolfram joined the faculty at Caltech and became the youngest recipient of the MacArthur Fellowships in 1981, at age 21.

In 1983, Wolfram left for the School of Natural Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he conducted research 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 behavior. He conjectured that the Rule 110 cellular automaton might be Turing complete, which was later proved correct.

Personal interests and activities
The significance data has on the products Wolfram creates transfers into his own life. He has an extensive log of personal analytics, including emails received and sent, keystrokes made, meetings and events attended, phone calls, even physical movement dating back to the 1980’s. In the preface of A New Kind of Science, he noted that he recorded over one-hundred million keystrokes and one-hundred mouse miles. He has stated “[personal analytics] can give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives”.

Stephen Wolfram was involved in helping create the alien language for the film Arrival, for which they used the Wolfram Language. Since 2018, Wolfram has been producing a podcast. On his podcast, Stephen discusses topics ranging from the history of science to the future of civilization and ethics of AI.