Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram is a British physicist, computer scientist, entrepreneur, and businessman who founded Wolfram Research, a computer technology company, in 1987. Wolfram earned a PhD in particle physics at the age of twenty and became one of the youngest recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship. He has worked at CalTech, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the University of Illinois, before starting Wolfram Research, where he created the technical computation software Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, as well as a programming language called the Wolfram Language. Wolfram authored and self-published the bestselling book A New Kind of Science in 2002. The book describes Wolfram's theory that the laws of the universe can be explained through relatively simple digital methods. Wolfram started the Wolfram Physics Project and is involved in a number of educational initiatives, including the Wolfram Summer School.

Stephen Wolfram was born in London on August 29, 1959. His father, Hugo Wolfram, worked in textile manufacturing as the managing director of The Lurex Company as well as being a novelist. Originally born in Germany, Hugo Wolfram's father was Jewish, and the family sent him to live in Britain in 1933. Stephen Wolfram's mother was a philosophy academic at Oxford University. Stephen Wolfram grew up in North Oxford, attending Dragon School from 1967 til 1972. Although he demonstrated exceptional intellect from an early age, Wolfram has stated that he struggled with arithmetic in school, finding the exercise of learning times tables boring:

I was terrible at arithmetic. I found it boring... Occasionally you’d need to work out six times nine. Okay, I can figure it out. It takes a few seconds to figure it out, but it was something where… I don’t really have a great excuse. It was something that I never found that interesting.

Growing up in the 1960s, Wolfram has attributed his fascination with physics and learning how things work to the Apollo Space program, stating:

I think at any given time in history there’s a most exciting thing that’s going on. In the 1960s, that was space, so 50 years ago, I was following the Apollo 11 landing and all this kind of thing. I got interested from that in how does this all work, and that got me interested in physics, so I started reading books about physics and so on and I discovered this amazing fact: that you could just go to a library and find all these books and start learning stuff and there wasn’t really any constraint.

Wolfram earned a scholarship to Eton College at age thirteen, attending the school between 1972 and 1976. In 1973, Wolfram got access to a computer for the first time, an Elliott 903C. He began writing programs, including a simple simulation of gas molecules in a 2D box and an error-correcting code to fix issues with the optical reader and the paper tape loader. At fourteen, he wrote his own book on particle physics; at fifteen he published his first scientific paper; and at seventeen, he had a paper published in the journal Nuclear Physics.

Wolfram in 1976 during his time at Eton College.

In 1976, at sixteen, Wolfram began attending St John's College Oxford University, studying physics on a scholarship. The summer after his first year, he worked in the Theoretical High-Energy Physics Groups at the Argonne National Laboratory, writing a scientific paper on heavy quark production. In 1978, Wolfram was invited to join the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) by Murray Gell-Mann. Wolfram has since said he left Oxford for a better environment to do particle physics research:

I was pretty much on the track of doing particle physics research, and being a physics undergraduate at Oxford wasn’t a particularly useful environment in which to do particle physics research. Since I had the opportunity fairly easily to go to graduate school in the US, I decided to do that and I chose to go to Caltech.

His first year at Caltech was the highest rate of publishing papers during his career. Wolfram estimates that he published a new particle physics paper every few weeks. This work included inventing the Fox-Wolfram variables in particle physics and discovering the Politzer-Wolfram upper bound on the mass of quarks. Wolfram decided to collect some of these papers to make a thesis, obtaining his PhD in 1979 only a few weeks after his twentieth birthday.

After completing his PhD, Wolfram joined the Caltech faculty working alongside some of his mentors including Richard Feynman, who said of Wolfram:

I don’t know of any others in this field that have the wide range of understanding of Dr. Wolfram...He seems to have worked on everything and has some original or careful judgement on any topic.

Wolfram with Richard Feynman in 1984.

Feynman wrote a letter recommending Wolfram for the MacArthur Genius Grant in 1981. At the age of twenty-one, Wolfram won the grant, making him one of the youngest ever to receive the award. In 1981, Wolfram also released commercially SMP, a computer algebra system that he started working on in 1979. Late in 1981, Wolfram began a new direction in his research aiming to understand the origins of the complexity of nature. His first key idea was to experiment with simple computer programs known as cellular automata. This allowed him to make a series of discoveries about the origins of complexity laying the groundwork for a field Wolfram named "Complex Systems Research." In 1982, Wolfram wrote a landmark paper on the subject, called “Statistical Mechanics of Cellular Automata,” which has gone on to be cited over a thousand times. The paper, published in Modern Physics in July 2023, defined cellular automata as:

Cellular automata are mathematical idealizations of physical systems in which space and time are discrete, and physical quantities take on a finite set of discrete values. A cellular automaton consists of a regular uniform lattice (or "array"), usually infinite in extent, with a discrete variable at each site ("cell"). The state of a cellular automaton is completely specified by the values of the variables at each site. A cellular automaton evolves in discrete time steps, with the value of the variable at one site being affected by the values of variables at sites in its "neighborhood" on the previous time step. The neighborhood of a site is typically taken to be the site itself and all immediately adjacent sites. The variables at each site are updated simultaneously ("synchronously"), based on the values of the variables in their neighborhood at the preceding time step, and according to a definite set of "local rules."

In 1983, Wolfram became a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and in 1986, he moved to the University of Illinois to start a research center studying the emergence of complex phenomena. Throughout the mid-1980s, Wolfram was working on complexity and finding connections between computation and nature. This work led to a range of applications, including a new randomness generation system and a new approach to computational fluid dynamics, both developed by Wolfram. In 1986, he also founded the first journal in the field, called Complex Systems.

In 1986, Wolfram began developing a general software system for mathematical computation called Mathematica. In 1987, he founded the company Wolfram Research Inc. with cofounder Theodore Gray, who helped develop Mathematica. The first version of Mathematica was released on June 23, 1988, and was immediately popular. The software expanded to more than ten computer platforms in 1989 and reached 100,000 users in 1990. The success of Mathematica led to Wolfram Research growing to one hundred employees and $10M annual revenue in 1990.

In the 1990s, Wolfram split his time between developing Mathematica at Wolfram Research and returning to scientific research, beginning work on A New Kind of Science in 1991. Building on his work from the mis-1980s and using Mathematica as a tool Wolfram went on to make a series of key scientific discoveries. Wolfram Research and Mathematica continued to grow with the company, expanding to 200 employees in 1993 and its flagship product reaching a million users in 1995. From its beginnings as a technical computing system for mathematical calculations, Mathematica has grown in scope significantly over the decades since its release, becoming responsible for inventions and discoveries across a number of fields as well as being a vital tool for education.

Building on Mathematica and ideas from A New Kind of Science, Wolfram Research began working on a more ambitious project called Wolfram Alpha. The answer engine aims to make much of the world's knowledge immediately computable and accessible. Wolfram Alpha was first released in May 2009. The software has gone on to be used by millions of people either computing answers directly or via intelligent assistants such as Siri and Alexa. In 2014, Wolfram Research released the Wolfram Language, a knowledge-based programming language that unifies a broad range of programming paradigms and its unique concept of symbolic programming.

Wolfram has been CEO of Wolfram Research since its founding and remains deeply involved in operations. This includes developing the company's technology, personally overseeing the functional design of the company's core products on a daily basis, and introducing new ideas and directions.

Wolfram first started working on A New Kind of Science in 1991, after his return to scientific research. Wolfram spent around a decade, with the help of his employees, putting together his ideas and writing what would become the final book. The 1200-page self-published book was released on May 14, 2002, going on to become a bestseller.

The cover and chapter titles of "A New Kind of Science."

The book provides a theoretical and methodological underpinning for the universe including that enormous complexity can be generated from simple rules and every system can be viewed as a computation. However, Wolfram's ideas in A New Kind of Science have also received criticism from the scientific community.

A prolific writer, Wolfram has continually published books, articles, blogs, scientific papers, and more over his career. Besides A New Kind of Science, notable books from Wolfram include the following:

• An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language, published in 2015, introduces students to modern computational thinking.
• Idea Makers, published in 2016, gives Wolfram's personal perspectives on the lives and ideas of a variety of notable people.
• Adventures of a Computational Explorer, published in 2019 tells the story of Wolfram's life.
• A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics, published in 2020, is an effort to find the fundamental theory of physics.
• What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work? Published in 2023, the short book describes how the technology behind ChatGPT works.

Wolfram maintains an extensive archive of his academic publications and regularly publishes blogs on developments in science and technology.

In 2020, Wolfram announced breakthroughs in finding a fundamental theory of physics and launched the Wolfram Physics Project to stimulate involvement in the project. A fundamental theory of physics would tie together all existing theories including general relativity and quantum mechanics. Wolfram's theory states the universe is modeled using points in space and rules that when applied generate more points, building a network. He suggests that model universes can be built using hypergraphs that describe these networks and that the rules that are applied eventually determine the characteristics that make up a given universe. The theory suggests it should be possible to start with a few points in space and develop a model that depicts the real universe. The project is aiming to find the rules that would produce the observable universe. The project's website provides documentation for people wanting to help work on Wolfram's theory.

A visual summary of the Wolfram Physics Project.

Wolfram is married and has four children. He has dual British and American citizenship and resides in Concord, Massachusetts. Wolfram is known for collecting data on himself. He was quoted in a 2012 Wired article as saying:

One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I’ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world’s largest collections of personal data.

Wolfram has a record of every email sent and received dating back to 1989. The plot below shows a plot with a dot for all three hundred thousand plus emails he has sent alongside their time and date.

Record of every email Wolfram sent between 1989 and 2012.

Wolfram has also tracked his keystrokes and has a database totaling over 100 million. For example, the backspace has consistently made up 7% of Wolfram's keystrokes.

Record of Wolfram's keystrokes between 2002 and 2012.

Wolfram's personal data collection also includes calendar events, meetings, phone calls, and physical activity.