Stephen Wolfram

Early life

Family

Stephen Wolfram was born in London in 1959 to Hugo and Sybil Wolfram, both German Jewish refugees to the United Kingdom. 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. Wolfram's mother, Sybil Wolfram, was a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall at University of Oxford from 1964 to 1993.

Wolfram is married to a mathematician. They have four children together.

Education

Wolfram was educated at Eton College, but left prematurely in 1976. As a young child, Wolfram had difficulties learning arithmetic. He entered St. John's College, Oxford, at age 17 and left in 1978 without graduating to attend the California Institute of Technology the following year, where he received a PhD in particle physics in 1980. Wolfram's thesis committee was composed of Richard Feynman, Peter Goldreich, Frank J. Sciulli, and Steven Frautschi, and chaired by Richard D. Field.

Early career

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. Following his PhD, Wolfram joined the faculty at Caltech and became the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, at age 21.

Later career

Complex systems and cellular automata

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, 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. He conjectured that the Rule 110 cellular automaton might be Turing complete, which a research assistant to Wolfram, Matthew Cook, later proved correct. 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. Wolfram's cellular-automata work came to be cited in more than 10,000 papers.

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 and helped initiate the field of complex systems. 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. In 1986, he founded the Center for Complex Systems Research (CCSR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In 1987, he founded the journal Complex Systems.

Symbolic Manipulation Program

Main article: Symbolic Manipulation Program

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. SMP was further developed and marketed commercially by Inference Corp. of Los Angeles during 1983–1988.

Mathematica

Main article: Mathematica

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.

''A New Kind of Science''

Main article: A New Kind of Science

From 1992 to 2002, Wolfram worked on his controversial book A New Kind of Science, 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.

Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine

Main article: Wolfram Alpha

In March 2009, Wolfram announced Wolfram Alpha, an answer engine. Wolfram Alpha launched in May 2009, 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. 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. and he was named Speaker of the Event for his 2012 talk at SXSW.

Touchpress

Main article: Touchpress

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. The company is no longer active.

Wolfram Language

Main article: Wolfram Language

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, 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. 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.

Wolfram Physics Project

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. 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.

Personal interests and activities

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."

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.

Bibliography

• Metamathematics: Foundations & Physicalization, (2022), Wolfram Media, Inc,
• Combinators: A Centennial View (2021)
• • A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics* (2020), Publisher: Wolfram Media,
• Adventures of a Computational Explorer (2019)
• Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People (2016)
• Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language (2015)
• The Mathematica Book (multiple editions) [Fifth edition: ]
• Cellular Automata and Complexity: Collected Papers (1994)
• Theory and Applications of Cellular Automata (1986)

References

References

1. (2013). "Proceedings of the 38th international symposium on International symposium on symbolic and algebraic computation – ISSAC '13".
2. (19 April 2016). "My Life in Technology—As Told at the Computer History Museum—Stephen Wolfram Writings".
3. (1980). "Some topics in theoretical high-energy physics". California Institute of Technology.
4. {{Scopus
5. "Biographical Facts for Stephen Wolfram".
6. "Stephen Wolfram". Wolfram Alpha.
7. "Stephen Wolfram: 'I am an information pack rat'".
8. [http://www.ams.org/profession/fellows-list List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society], retrieved 1 September 2013.
9. ''The Universal Mind: The Evolution of Machine Intelligence and Human Psychology'', Xiphias Press, 1 Sep 2016, Michael Peragine
10. [http://www.oxfordtimes.co.uk/business/profiles/931620.Telling_a_good_yarn/ Telling a good yarn by Jenny Lunnon], Oxford Times, Thursday 21 September 2006.
11. [http://www.psychoanalytikerinnen.de/greatbritain_biographies.html#Friedlaender Kate Friedländer née Frankl (1902–1949)], Psychoanalytikerinnen. Biografisches Lexikon.
12. "Stephen Wolfram".
13. "The Life and Times of Stephen Wolfram: Biographical Facts".
14. [http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2014/06/a-speech-for-high-school-graduates/ 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."
15. [https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/24/us/physicist-awarded-genius-prize-finds-reality-in-invisible-world.html 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."
16. ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=bbN-6aDFrrAC&q=murray+gelman+STephen+wolfram&pg=PA151 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."
17. [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/29/stephen-wolfram-textbook-never-interested-me-wolframalpha 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."
18. {{MathGenealogy
19. Wolfram, Stephen. (1980). "Some Topics in Theoretical High-Energy Physics". California Institute of Technology.
20. (7 November 1974). "English: StephenWolframCalTechThesisApplication".
21. Somers, James. (2018-04-05). "The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete".
22. "FOUNDATION TO SUPPORT 21 AS 'GENIUSES' FOR 5 YEARS". The New York Times.
23. Arndt, Michael. (May 17, 2002). "Stephen Wolfram's Simple Science".
24. (1987). "Who got Einstein's office? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study". Addison-Wesley.
25. Cook, Matthew. (2004). "Universality in Elementary Cellular Automata". Complex Systems.
26. (2002). "Stephen Wolfram: What kind of science is this?". Nature.
27. (2020-03-03). "Brief notes and history of computing in Mexico during 50 years". International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems.
28. Levy, Steven. (1 June 2002). "The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything...".
29. W. Daniel Hillis. (February 1989). "Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine". Physics Today.
30. Pines, David. (2018). "Emerging Syntheses in Science: Proceedings of the Founding Workshops of the Santa Fe Institute". Addison-Wesley.
31. "The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything".
32. (1983). "Caltech Torn by Dispute over Software". Science.
33. (2002). "A New Kind of Science". Wolfram Media.
34. "Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science".
35. Giles, Jim. (2002-05-01). "What kind of science is this?". Nature.
36. Wolfram, Stephen. (5 March 2009). "Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming!". Wolfram Blog.
37. Sorrel, Charlie. "Wolfram Alpha for iPhone Drops from $50 to $2".
38. "Announcing Wolfram{{!}}Alpha Pro". Wolfram{{!}}Alpha blog.
39. Levy, Steven. (12 February 2010). "TED 2010: How to Ace a TED Talk". WIRED.
40. (February 2010). "Stephen Wolfram: Computing a theory of everything". TED.
41. "SXSW Award Winners 2012".
42. "Popular Science columnist earns prestigious American Chemical Society award".
43. [http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ Wolfram Language reference page Retrieved on 14 May 2014]
44. Shankland, Stephen. "Premium Mathematica software free on budget Raspberry Pi".
45. [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/03/stephen_wolfram_s_new_programming_language_can_he_make_the_world_computable.html Slate's article Stephen Wolfram's New Programming Language: He Can Make The World Computable, 6 March 2014. Retrieved on 14 May 2014.]
46. "TIOBE Index".
47. "Stephen Wolfram Invites You to Solve Physics".
48. (2020-04-14). "Stephen Wolfram's hypergraph project aims for a fundamental theory of physics".
49. (6 May 2020). "Physicists Criticize Stephen Wolfram's 'Theory of Everything'". Scientific American.
50. (2020). "The Trouble With Stephen Wolfram's New 'Fundamental Theory of Physics'". Gizmodo.
51. Wolfram, Stephen. (8 March 2012). "The Personal Analytics of My Life".
52. Rhodes, Margaret. (16 November 2016). "How Arrival's Designers Crafted a Mesmerizing Language".
53. Seppala, Timothy J.. (15 November 2016). "Dissecting the alien language in 'Arrival'".
54. (13 August 2016). "'Idea Makers' tackles scientific thinkers' big ideas and personal lives Human side of science emphasized in new book". Society for Science & the Public.
55. [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/14/stephen-wolfram-seeks-to-democratize-his-software/?_r=0 Stephen Wolfram Aims to Democratize His Software] by Steve Lohr, ''[[The New York Times]]'', 14 December 2015.