Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram was born on August 29, 1959, in London.⁠[1]

He was a King’s Scholar at Eton College from 1972 to 1976, published his first scientific paper in 1975, attended St John’s College, Oxford, from 1976 to 1978, and moved to Caltech in 1978.⁠[2]

By his own account, he defended his Caltech physics PhD on November 5, 1979, aged 20 years, 2 months, and 7 days, while discussing the second law of thermodynamics with Richard FeynmanRichard FeynmanRichard Feynman (Richard Phillips Feynman, 1918–1988) was an American theoretical physicist who rebuilt quantum electrodynamics with the path-integral formulation and Feynman diagrams, for which he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. He took part in the Manhattan Project during World War II and then taught for decades at the California Institute of Technology, where his introductory physics course became The Feynman Lectures on Physics; in 1986, as a member of the presidential commission investigating the space shuttle Challenger accident, he used ice water to demonstrate that the O-ring lost its resilience at low temperature.Open the full entry; he says he held the record as Caltech’s youngest PhD for 30 years.⁠[3]

Caltech’s thesis repository lists his dissertation as “Some Topics in Theoretical High-Energy Physics,” advised by Steven C. Frautschi and Richard D. Field, and dated 1980.⁠[4]

In 1979 he began building the computer algebra system SMP, releasing it commercially in 1981; his official biography calls it the first modern computer algebra system.⁠[5]

The SMP documentation, written by him with Chris A. Cole and others, was issued by the California Institute of Technology in 1981 and by Inference Corporation in 1983.⁠[6]

In June 1981 he was named to the MacArthur Foundation’s June 1981 class of Fellows as a computer scientist and physicist, aged 21 and based in Pasadena.⁠[7]

From 1981 he studied cellular automata; he coined the term “complex systems research” in 1982 and identified computational irreducibility in 1984. In 1986 he founded the Center for Complex Systems Research and joined the University of Illinois as a professor, and in 1987 he founded the journal Complex Systems.⁠[2]

At 23 he became one of the youngest senior researchers ever at the Institute for Advanced Study.⁠[8]

In 1987 he founded the software company Wolfram Research.⁠[9]

He began developing Mathematica in late 1986, and its first version was released on June 23, 1988.⁠[5]

By April 1988 the 28-year-old had turned to software entrepreneurship, negotiating with hardware makers including Sun to bundle the program and selling versions for every type of machine through Wolfram Research.⁠[8]

In 2002 he bypassed peer review and outside editors to self-publish the roughly 1,200-page A New Kind of Science, arguing that simple rules may hold the key to nature; the book sold well with the public.⁠[10]

Physicist J. Doyne Farmer wrote that little in the book would be regarded as new by experts in the field and criticized its lack of a bibliography, with attributions buried in its notes.⁠[11]

Wolfram responded that many critics “haven’t read the book” and said the criticism vindicated his decision not to show the work to others before publication.⁠[10]

On May 14, 2007, the fifth anniversary of A New Kind of Science, he announced a $25,000 prize for determining whether a particular 2-state, 3-symbol Turing machine is universal; that October he announced that Alex Smith, a 20-year-old undergraduate from Birmingham, UK, had produced a 40-page proof that it is.⁠[12]

On May 18, 2009, Wolfram Alpha LLC announced the general availability of Wolfram|Alpha, which it called the world’s first “computational knowledge engine,” offered free on the web.⁠[13]

On June 25, 2019, as founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, he testified at a hearing of a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on “persuasive technology” on internet platforms.⁠[14]

On April 14, 2020, he announced the Wolfram Physics Project, saying he may have found a path to a fundamental theory of physics; he said two young physicists at the 2019 Wolfram Summer School, Jonathan Gorard and Max Piskunov, had spurred him to begin in earnest that October.⁠[15]

The project published its materials openly and invited outside researchers to verify calculations and propose testable predictions, while physicists including Chanda Prescod-Weinstein criticized it for sidestepping peer review.⁠[16]

On April 18, 2020, he appeared on episode 89 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing communicating with alien intelligence, the nature of computation, physics emerging from computation, a fundamental theory of physics, and Richard Feynman.⁠[17]

On September 15, 2020, he returned for episode 124, discussing key moments in the history of physics, philosophy of science, predicting the pandemic, computational irreducibility, and a theory of everything.⁠[18]

On October 27, 2021, he appeared for a third time, on episode 234, discussing complexity, randomness in the universe, the Wolfram Physics Project, discrete space and time, quantum mechanics and hypergraphs, and the nature of intelligence.⁠[19]

On March 23, 2023, he announced that, through work by his team and OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry, ChatGPT could call on Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language through a plugin; he argued that a large language model cannot by itself be relied on for nontrivial computation. A later note on the post says OpenAI has since discontinued ChatGPT plugins in favor of custom GPTs.⁠[20]

On May 9, 2023, he appeared for a fourth time, on episode 376, discussing Wolfram|Alpha and ChatGPT, how ChatGPT works, the dangers of AI, the nature of truth, and the future of education.⁠[21]

As of October 2026 he remained founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, lived in Concord, Massachusetts, and held British and American citizenship.⁠[1]

Wolfram Research says it has more than 700 geographically distributed employees.⁠[9]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.stephenwolfram.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

X: Public account: https://x.com/stephen_wolfram (opens in a new window)⁠[5]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwolfram (opens in a new window)⁠[5]

Wolfram Research: Official website: https://www.wolfram.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[9]