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Stephen Wolfram

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Template:Short description Template:Undisclosed paid Template:Use British English Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox scientist

Stephen Wolfram (Template:IPAc-en Template:Respell; born 29 August 1959) is a British-American<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer algebra and theoretical physics.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite magazineTemplate:Cbignore</ref> In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.<ref>List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 1 September 2013.</ref>

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.

Early lifeEdit

FamilyEdit

Stephen Wolfram was born in London in 1959 to Hugo and Sybil Wolfram, both German Jewish refugees to the United Kingdom.<ref>The Universal Mind: The Evolution of Machine Intelligence and Human Psychology, Xiphias Press, 1 Sep 2016, Michael Peragine</ref> 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.<ref name="Telling a good yarn by Jenny Lunnon">Telling a good yarn by Jenny Lunnon, Oxford Times, Thursday 21 September 2006.</ref> Wolfram's mother, Sybil Wolfram, was a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall at University of Oxford from 1964 to 1993.<ref>Kate Friedländer née Frankl (1902–1949), Psychoanalytikerinnen. Biografisches Lexikon.</ref>

Wolfram is married to a mathematician. They have four children together.<ref>Template:Cite episode</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

EducationEdit

Wolfram was educated at Eton College, but left prematurely in 1976.<ref>A Speech for (High-School) Graduates by Stephen Wolfram (a commencement speech for Stanford Online High School), StephenWolfram.com, 9 June 2014: "You know, as it happens, I myself never officially graduated from high school, and this is actually the first high school graduation I've ever been to."</ref> As a young child, Wolfram had difficulties learning arithmetic.<ref>PHYSICIST AWARDED 'GENIUS' PRIZE FINDS REALITY IN INVISIBLE WORLD, by GLADWIN HILL, New York Times, 24 May 1981: "When I first went to school, they thought I was behind, he says, because I didn't want to read the silly books they gave us. And I never was able to do arithmetic. It was when he got into higher mathematics, such as calculus, he says, that he realized there was an invisible world that he wanted to explore."</ref> He entered St. John's College, Oxford, at age 17 and left in 1978<ref>Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell, 2009, p. 151: "In the early 1980s, Stephen Wolfram, a physicist working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, became fascinated by cellular automata and the patterns they make. Wolfram is one of those legendary child prodigies people like to tell stories about. Born in London in 1959, Wolfram published his first physics paper at 15. Two years later, in the summer after his first year at Oxford, ... Wolfram wrote a paper in the field of 'quantum chromodynamics' that attracted the attention of Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who invited Wolfram to join his group at Caltech."</ref> without graduatingTemplate:R<ref>Stephen Wolfram: 'The textbook has never interested me': The British child genius who abandoned physics to devote himself to coding and the cosmos, by Zoë Corbyn, The Guardian, Saturday 28 June 2014: "He entered Oxford University at 17 without A-levels and left around a year later without graduating. He was bored and he had been invited to cross the pond by the prestigious California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to do a PhD. "I had written a bunch of papers and so was pretty well known by that time."</ref> to attend the California Institute of Technology the following year, where he received a PhD<ref name="mathgene">Template:MathGenealogy</ref> in particle physics in 1980.<ref name="wolframphd">Template:Cite thesis</ref> Wolfram's thesis committee was composed of Richard Feynman, Peter Goldreich, Frank J. Sciulli, and Steven Frautschi, and chaired by Richard D. Field.<ref name="wolframphd"/><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Early careerEdit

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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}Template:Cbignore</ref> Following his PhD, Wolfram joined the faculty at Caltech and became the youngest recipient<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, at age 21.<ref name="arndt20020517">Template:Cite magazine</ref>

Later careerEdit

Complex systems and cellular automataEdit

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,Template:Cn 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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He conjectured that the Rule 110 cellular automaton might be Turing complete, which a research assistant to Wolfram, Matthew Cook, later proved correct.<ref name="proof">Template:Cite journal</ref> 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.<ref name="bio">Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Wolfram's cellular-automata work came to be cited in more than 10,000 papers.<ref name="Levy">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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<ref name="DH">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and helped initiate the field of complex systems.Template:Cn 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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> In 1986, he founded the Center for Complex Systems Research (CCSR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.<ref name="wired.com">Template:Cite magazine</ref> In 1987, he founded the journal Complex Systems.<ref name="wired.com"/>

Symbolic Manipulation ProgramEdit

{{#invoke:Labelled list hatnote|labelledList|Main article|Main articles|Main page|Main pages}} 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.<ref name="torn">Template:Cite journal</ref> SMP was further developed and marketed commercially by Inference Corp. of Los Angeles during 1983–1988.

MathematicaEdit

{{#invoke:Labelled list hatnote|labelledList|Main article|Main articles|Main page|Main pages}} 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 released on 23 June 1988, when he left academia. In 1987, he founded Wolfram Research, which continues to develop and market the program.<ref name=bio />

A New Kind of ScienceEdit

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From 1992 to 2002, Wolfram worked on his controversial book A New Kind of Science,<ref name="bio"/><ref name="newkind">Template:Cite book</ref> 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 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engineEdit

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In March 2009, Wolfram announced Wolfram Alpha, an answer engine. Wolfram Alpha launched in May 2009,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> 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.<ref> Template:Cite news</ref>

TouchpressEdit

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In 2010, Wolfram co-founded Touchpress with Theodore Gray, Max Whitby, and John Cromie. The company specialised in creating in-depth premium apps and games covering a wide range of educational subjects designed for children, parents, students, and educators. Touchpress published more than 100 apps.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The company is no longer active.

Wolfram LanguageEdit

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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,<ref>Wolfram Language reference page Retrieved on 14 May 2014</ref> 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> 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.<ref>Slate's article Stephen Wolfram's New Programming Language: He Can Make The World Computable, 6 March 2014. Retrieved on 14 May 2014.</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Wolfram Physics ProjectEdit

File:Wolfram Physics Spatial Hypergraph.png
A spatial hypergraph

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.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Personal interests and activitiesEdit

Wolfram has a log of personal analytics, including emails received and sent, keystrokes made, meetings and events attended, recordings of phone calls, and even physical movement dating back to the 1980s. In the preface of A New Kind of Science, he noted that he recorded over 100 million keystrokes and 100 mouse miles. He has said that personal analytics "can give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives."<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

Wolfram was a scientific consultant for the 2016 film Arrival. He and his son Christopher Wolfram wrote some of the code featured on screen, such as the code in graphics depicting an analysis of the alien logograms, for which they used the Wolfram Language.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

BibliographyEdit

  • Metamathematics: Foundations & Physicalization, (2022), Wolfram Media, Inc, ASIN:B0BPN7SHN3
  • Combinators: A Centennial View (2021)
  • A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics (2020), Publisher: Wolfram Media, Template:ISBN
  • Adventures of a Computational Explorer (2019)
  • Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People (2016)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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ReferencesEdit

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External linksEdit

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