Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram (born London, 1959) is a British-American computer scientist, physicist and businessman. He works in computer algebra and theoretical physics. His career starts in particle physics and moves on to symbolic computation and cellular automata, a path that shows how academic research and technology business can share one working life.

The son of a textile manufacturer and an Oxford philosophy tutor, he was described as a child prodigy from an early age. He was educated at Eton, entered St John's College, Oxford, at 17, and received a PhD in particle physics from Caltech in 1980, at about twenty. At 21 he received a MacArthur Fellowship, one of the best-known grants in the United States.

At Caltech he developed SMP, a computer algebra system that became the basis for Mathematica. A dispute over the intellectual property of that software ended his time at the institution. He then worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and later at the University of Illinois, where he studied cellular automata, largely through computer simulations. There he founded the Center for Complex Systems Research and the journal Complex Systems.

In 1988 he founded Wolfram Research, which released Mathematica that year, and he left academia to devote himself to the company. His book A New Kind of Science (2002) argues that very simple programs can generate great complexity and promotes a method based on computational experiments. The book drew criticism for its tone, its scarce references and the novelty of some of its claims. He later promoted Wolfram Alpha, launched in 2009, and the Wolfram Physics Project.

His legacy lies mainly in the software that the scientific community still uses and in the momentum he gave to the study of complex systems. His proposals about fundamental physics, by contrast, remain widely debated among physicists.