| Stephen Wolfram  Born: 29-Aug-1959
Birthplace: London, England
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Mathematician, Computer Programmer Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Creator of Mathematica As a boy, Stephen Wolfram was called a young Einstein. At 13, he earned a scholarship to Eton College. At 14, he wrote his first book on particle physics. At 17, the scientific journal Nuclear Physics published a paper he'd written. At 18, he wrote a widely-acclaimed paper on heavy quark production. At 20, he got his PhD in theoretical physics.
At 21, Wolfram became obsessed with cellular automata -- a field pioneered in the 1950s, and largely left to the geeks since then. The notion behind cellular automata is that if simple structures are constructed in the proper setting, they could reproduce themselves without further intervention. It became the basis for a computer game called Life, but Wolfram saw the potential for more: he thought Life-like cellular automata could be adapted to construct mathematical models mimicking the complexity of the universe itself.
Only 21 years old, Wolfram was already on the faculty at Caltech, cranking out a series of papers and singlehandedly reviving eggheads' interest in cellular automata. Then someone reminded him that the small print in his Caltech contract specified that the school basically owned his work. Not surprisingly, he promptly left Caltech for Princeton.
At Princeton and then the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Wolfram was given carte blanche, but he moved the project toward more simplicity -- one-dimensional lines, instead of two-or three-dimensional blocks, that could reproduce themselves, symbolically replicating how nature works. As yet, he hasn't reconstructed science, but along the way Wolfram needed software that could juggle programming, graphics, advanced formulas, and numerical functions, so he wrote a li'l software application called Mathematica. It quickly became one of the most popular pieces of scientific software ever, and made Wolfram a millionaire.
Now he runs his enormously profitable Wolfram Research by day, and reclusively delves deeper and deeper into cellular automata overnight ... almost every night. He's also written and self-published A New Kind of Science, suggesting that mathematics is much too restrictive. Father: Hugo Wolfram (novelist, Into a Neutral Country)
Mother: Sybil Wolfram (Oxford professor of philosophy, d.)
Brother: Conrad Wolfram (younger)
Wife: (mathematician, three children)
High School: Eton College
University: Oxford University
University: PhD Theoretical Physics, Caltech (1979)
Professor: Caltech (1978-82)
Professor: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1986-88)
Bell Laboratories consultant
Los Alamos National Laboratory consultant
Thinking Machines consultant
Institute for Advanced Study 1982-86
MacArthur Fellowship 1981
Jewish Ancestry Paternal
Official Website:
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/
Author of books:
Cellular Automata and Complexity: Collected Papers
Mathematica: The Student Book
Mathematica Reference Guide
The Mathematica Book
New Kind of Science
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