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As a businessman, he is the founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research where he works as chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine.
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,[citation needed] 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.[25] He conjectured that the Rule 110 cellular automaton might be Turing complete, which a research assistant to Wolfram, Matthew Cook, later proved correct.[26] 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.[4][27] Wolfram's cellular-automata work came to be cited in more than 10,000 papers.[28]
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.[32] SMP was further developed and marketed commercially by Inference Corp. of Los Angeles during 1983–1988.
From 1992 to 2002, Wolfram worked on his controversial book A New Kind of Science,[4][33] 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 which 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 a majority of scientific areas in general, 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.[34][35]
In March 2009, Wolfram announced Wolfram Alpha, an answer engine. WolframAlpha later launched in May 2009,[36] and a paid-for version with extra features launched in February 2012 that was met with criticism for its high price that was later dropped from $50.00 to $2.00.[37][38] 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.[39]
In 2010, Wolfram co-founded Touchpress along 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. Since the launch, Touchpress has published more than 100 apps.[40] The company is no longer active.
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,[41] 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.[42] 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.[43][44]
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.[45][46] 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 state that Wolfram's results are non-quantitative and arbitrary.[47][48] This sentiment is not universal, however. Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, while initially skeptical of the project, remarked, "When I look at this today, I honestly think that this research program is going very well, and I think it's about time that physicists pay a little more attention to it."[49]
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 stated "[personal analytics] can give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives."[50]
Stephen Wolfram was involved as 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.[51][52]
Cellular Automata and Complexity: Collected Papers (1994)
Theory and Applications of Cellular Automata (1986)
References
^Wolfram, S. (2013). "Computer algebra". Proceedings of the 38th international symposium on International symposium on symbolic and algebraic computation – ISSAC '13. pp. 7–8. doi:10.1145/2465506.2465930. ISBN9781450320597. S2CID37099593.
^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."
^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."
^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…"
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