Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram: The Man Who Wants to Compute the Universe

He published his first peer-reviewed paper in particle physics at fifteen. He left Eton before finishing, left Oxford without a degree, and had a Caltech PhD in theoretical high-energy physics at twenty, examined by a committee that included Richard Feynman. In June 1981, at twenty-one, he became the youngest person the MacArthur Foundation had ever named a Fellow. Everything Stephen Wolfram has done since has been an attempt to convert that early velocity into a permanent change in how science works — and the argument about whether he has succeeded is now more than forty years old.

London, Oxford, Pasadena

He was born on August 29, 1959, in London to Hugo Wolfram, a textile manufacturer who ran the Lurex Company, and Sybil Wolfram, a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, from 1964 to 1993. Both were German Jewish refugees to Britain; his maternal grandmother was the psychoanalyst Kate Friedlander. He went to the Dragon School and then Eton, which he left prematurely in 1976, and entered St John's College, Oxford, at seventeen, departing without graduating. From the age of fifteen he was doing publishable research in quantum field theory and particle physics; he had ten peer-reviewed papers before he left Oxford. His Caltech thesis, "Some Topics in Theoretical High-Energy Physics" — dated 1979 by the MacArthur Foundation and 1980 in other accounts — was chaired by Richard D. Field, with Feynman, Peter Goldreich, Frank Sciulli and Steven Frautschi on the committee.

The First Fight

Between 1979 and 1981 he led the development of SMP, the Symbolic Manipulation Program, in the Caltech physics department — an early computer algebra system built because he wanted the algebra done for him. It also produced the first of the recurring disputes: Caltech and Wolfram disagreed over patents, copyright and the propriety of faculty commercial involvement, and he resigned. SMP was commercialized by Inference Corp. between 1983 and 1988.

Cellular Automata

At the Institute for Advanced Study from 1983 he abandoned particle physics for cellular automata — grids of cells that update according to trivially simple local rules, and which, in certain cases, generate output of unbounded complexity. He devised the Wolfram code for naming one-dimensional automata and a four-class scheme for sorting their behaviour. Rule 30, a rule of near-nothing that produces apparent randomness, became his central exhibit; he conjectured that Rule 110 was Turing complete, and his research assistant Matthew Cook proved it. Wolfram then sued Cook and blocked publication on non-disclosure grounds until he could publish the result himself. His cellular automata work has been cited in more than ten thousand papers.

He was at the founding workshops of the Santa Fe Institute in 1984 alongside Murray Gell-Mann, Manfred Eigen, Philip Anderson and Frank Wilczek; collaborated with Feynman in the mid-1980s on Connection Machine simulations; founded the Center for Complex Systems Research at the University of Illinois in 1986; and started the journal *Complex Systems* in 1987.

Mathematica

Then he built the thing that made everything else possible. *Mathematica* was released on June 23, 1988, and Wolfram left academia the same year to run Wolfram Research, which he had founded the year before. The MacArthur Foundation notes it is used by more than a million professionals. Whatever anyone thinks of his cosmology, Wolfram solved his own funding problem permanently by shipping a tool that scientists actually needed — a rare arrangement, and one that let him spend the next decade on a book nobody was paying for.

A New Kind of Science

He worked on it from 1992 to 2002, largely in isolation, and published a vast book arguing that the universe is discrete and best described by simple computer programs rather than by traditional mathematical equations, and that this reframing would revolutionize physics, biology, mathematics and more. The reception was harsh. Critics accused him of taking credit for other people's work and of drawing sweeping conclusions without the evidence to support them.

Alpha, and the Physics Project

*Wolfram Alpha* was announced in March 2009 and launched that May: not a search engine but a computational knowledge engine, answering questions by calculating rather than retrieving. It serves millions of queries and has powered intelligent assistants including Siri. The Wolfram Language was formally announced at South by Southwest in March 2014, though it had effectively existed inside *Mathematica* for three decades; bundling it with the Raspberry Pi in 2013 provoked argument about its proprietary licensing, and it has never become widely used.

In April 2020 he announced the Wolfram Physics Project, which attempts to derive physical law from hypergraphs rewritten by minimal rules. "From an extremely simple model," he claimed, "we're able to reproduce special relativity, general relativity and the core results of quantum mechanics." Physicists have been unimpressed, characterizing the results as non-quantitative and arbitrary. He has logged his own life since the 1980s — emails, keystrokes, mouse movements, calls, location — and by 2002 had recorded over a hundred million keystrokes and a hundred miles of mouse travel. He was the scientific consultant on *Arrival* (2016), and with his son Christopher wrote the code used for the film's alien logogram analysis.

Why Stephen Is Called a Genius

The raw cognitive horsepower is not in dispute. Publishable particle physics at fifteen, a Caltech doctorate at twenty examined by Feynman, the youngest MacArthur Fellow ever named at twenty-one. The MacArthur citation credits him with "a major new approach to science, in which nature is described in terms of simple computer programs rather than traditional mathematical equations." He then did what most theorists never manage: he built the instrument. *Mathematica* is infrastructure, used by more than a million people, and *Wolfram Alpha* was a working computational knowledge engine years before the phrase meant anything. The cellular automata work is heavily cited, and the core observation — that extremely simple rules can generate irreducible complexity — is a genuine contribution.

The counter-case is equally documented. *A New Kind of Science* was met with accusations that he had not credited predecessors and had claimed far more than he demonstrated; twenty-four years on, the promised revolution has not arrived. The Physics Project has not persuaded physicists. He sued the assistant who proved his own conjecture, blocking publication so he could publish it first — a fact about character bearing directly on the attribution complaints. He works largely outside peer review and publishes through his own company, insulating the ideas from the criticism that would sharpen them. The Wolfram Language, after thirty years, remains little used outside his ecosystem. Wolfram is an exceptional mind and an exceptional engineer whose scientific claims consistently outrun his evidence, and the second thing has cost him credit for the first.

Legacy

*Mathematica* and *Wolfram Alpha* are permanent parts of the scientific toolkit, and the idea that simple computational rules can generate complexity is now standard. Whether the universe turns out to be a hypergraph is a question his own company will probably still be asking long after everyone else has stopped.

Achievements

• Notable work: Wolfram Language
• Notable work: A New Kind of Science
• Notable work: Mathematica
• Affiliated with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Wolfram Research
• Educated at California Institute of Technology, Eton College and Dragon School
• Worked as mathematician, physicist and computer scientist