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Stephen WolframBritish physicist, mathematician, programmer, writer
Date of Birth: 29.08.1959
Country:  Great Britain |
Content:
- Biography of Stephen Wolfram
- Early Life and Education
- Early Career in Physics
- Development of Mathematica
- Wolfram Research and Later Career
- Author and Innovator
- Personal Life
Biography of Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram is a British physicist, mathematician, programmer, and writer. He is best known as the developer of the computer algebra system Mathematica and the knowledge engine WolframAlpha.
Early Life and Education
Stephen Wolfram was born into a family of Jewish refugees who had immigrated from Westphalia, Germany to England in 1933. His father, Hugo Wolfram, was a writer, and his mother, Sybil Wolfram, was a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. Wolfram has a younger brother, Conrad, who is an IT specialist and serves as the director of international relations and strategic development in his brother's company. Due to his incredible achievements in education, Wolfram was often referred to as the "little Einstein" during his childhood. He received his education at Eton College, where he excelled academically.
Early Career in Physics
At the age of 15, Wolfram published a paper on elementary particle physics, and at 17, he enrolled at the University of Oxford. In the St John's College, he began his research in physics. Within a year, he published his widely cited work on the production of heavy quarks. In 1978, Wolfram continued his research at the California Institute of Technology, where he explored the connection between cosmology and elementary particle physics. He later delved into the theory of strong interactions and cellular automata. In 1979, he earned his PhD.
Development of Mathematica
From 1979 to 1981, Wolfram led the development of the Symbolic Manipulation Program (SMP), a precursor to Mathematica, at the university. However, due to disputes over intellectual property related to SMP, he left the university. In 1983, he joined the Institute for Advanced Study, where he worked on cellular automaton models applied to cryptography and hydrodynamics. Since 1986, Wolfram has been working at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the development of Mathematica began. In June 1988, Mathematica was published, and Wolfram also launched his journal, Complex Systems.
Wolfram Research and Later Career
In 1987, Wolfram founded Wolfram Research in Champaign, Illinois, a company that specializes in software development. He has served as its president since then. Wolfram's work in particle physics, cosmology, and computer science earned him numerous accolades, including a MacArthur Fellowship. His collaboration with Jeffrey Fox in quantum chromodynamics continues to be used in experimental particle physics.
Author and Innovator
In 2002, Wolfram published his book "A New Kind of Science," the result of more than a decade of intensive work. The book quickly became a bestseller. In March 2009, Wolfram announced the launch of the WolframAlpha knowledge base and computational algorithms. It became publicly available on May 16, 2009. In the same year, he received the Friedrich L. Bauer Prize from the Technical University of Munich.
