Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram is a distinguished scientist, inventor, author, and business leader. Born in London in 1959, Wolfram was educated at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech. He published his first scientific paper at the age of 15, and had received his PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of 20. Having started to use computers in 1973, Wolfram rapidly became a leader in the emerging field of scientific computing, and in 1979 he began the construction of SMP—the first modern computer algebra system—which he released commercially in 1981. In recognition of his early work in physics and computing, Wolfram became in 1981 the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship.

That same year, Wolfram set out on an ambitious new direction in science aimed at understanding the origins of complexity in nature. Through the mid-1980s, Wolfram continued this work, discovering a number of fundamental connections between computation and nature, and inventing such concepts as computational irreducibility. Following his scientific work on complex systems research, in 1986 Wolfram founded the first research center and the first journal in the field, "Complex Systems."

In 1987, Wolfram launched Wolfram Research, Inc., which soon distinguished itself as a premier software company with the release of the first version of "Mathematica." A major advance in computing, "Mathematica" is a computational software program used in science, mathematics, and engineering.

By the mid-1990s his discoveries led him to develop a fundamentally new conceptual framework, which he then spent the remainder of the 1990s applying not only to new kinds of questions, but also to many existing foundational problems in physics, biology, computer science, mathematics, and several other fields. And after more than ten years of highly concentrated work, Wolfram finally described his achievements in his 1200-page book "A New Kind of Science."

Building on these previous projects, Wolfram in May 2009 launched Wolfram|Alpha—an ambitious, long-term project to make as much of the world's knowledge as possible computable, and accessible to everyone.