Stephen Wolfram (born 29 August 1959 in London, England) is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman.^[1,4,3] Wolfram was educated at Dragon School, Eton College, St. John's College, Oxford (where he received no degree), and the California Institute of Technology, where he earned a PhD in 1980 under advisor Richard D. Field with the thesis "Some Topics in Theoretical High-Energy Physics".^[55,56] Over his career, he has been affiliated with the California Institute of Technology, the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, Thinking Machines Corporation, and Wolfram Research.^[1]

Working across mathematics, theoretical physics, computer science and computer algebra, cellular automata, and the development of knowledge-based system programming, his notable creations and works include Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, the Wolfram Language, and the book "A New Kind of Science".^{[58,3,57,54,7,4]} As an entrepreneur and businessman, Wolfram is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, where he works as the chief designer and developer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine.^[4,3] His honors include a MacArthur Fellowship awarded in 1981, and in 2012 he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.^[59] His online presence includes his website at stephenwolfram.com and his Twitter account @stephen_wolfram.

Wolfram was born to a family of Jewish origin.^[1,61] His father, Hugo Wolfram, was a writer and businessman, and his mother was a psychology professor at Oxford University.^[3] He also has a younger brother named Conrad Wolfram.^[17] Wolfram's wife is a mathematician, and they have four children.^[18]

Stephen Wolfram was born in London in 1959 to Hugo and Sybil Wolfram, both German Jewish refugees to the United Kingdom.^[60] His father, Hugo Wolfram, was a textile manufacturer and served as managing director of the Lurex Company—makers of the fabric Lurex.^[26] His mother, Sybil Wolfram, was a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall, a constituent college of the University of Oxford, from 1964 to 1993.^[61] His maternal grandmother was British psychoanalyst Kate Friedlander.

Wolfram was married to mathematician Elise Cawley until her death in 2026.^[62] They have four children together: Alexander, Catherine, Christopher, and Elizabeth.^[63,64]

As a young child, Wolfram had difficulties learning arithmetic.^[66] Wolfram was educated at Eton College, but left prematurely in 1976 for some reasons and continued his education by enrolling at St John's School.^[65] He entered St. John's College, Oxford, at age 17, but found the lectures there awful and left in 1978 without graduating.^[69,68,3]

He attended the California Institute of Technology the following year, where he received his PhD in particle physics in 1980 at the age of 20.^{[69,68,3,186]} Wolfram's thesis committee was chaired by Richard D. Field and included Richard Feynman, Peter Goldreich, Frank J. Sciulli, and Steven Frautschi. His thesis advisors were Geoffrey C. Fox and Hugh David Politzer.^[15]

At the age of 15, Wolfram began research in applied quantum field theory and particle physics and published scientific papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, having published ten such papers by the time he left Oxford.^[70,3] Following his PhD, Wolfram joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981—the first year the fellowship was given—becoming its youngest recipient at age 21.^[71,155]

In 2010, Wolfram gave a lecture for TED, where he provided information about Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha.^{[156,157,58,158]} In 2012, he became a member of the American Mathematical Society.^[3]

When Wolfram was 15 years old, he became interested in quantum field theory and particle physics, publishing his first paper during these years.^[191] The subject of this work was the production of matter, fundamental forces, fundamental particles, and their currents, and he also worked on the physics of hadronic and leptonic systems, publishing papers in Nuclear Physics B, Australian Journal of Physics, Nuovo Cimento, and Physical Review D.^[191] When he turned 18, his publications received citations in many papers related to heavy quarks. Wolfram worked on strong interactions together with Geoffrey C. Fox and continued his physics research until his early twenties.^[3]

At the age of 12, Wolfram wrote a dictionary containing physics terms, and subsequently wrote his first book on particle physics at the age of 13 to 14.^{[188,189,190,187]} However, these works were not published.

During 1979–1981, Wolfram led the development of the computer algebra system SMP (Symbolic Manipulation Program), a symbolic programming method, while working in the Caltech physics department. This method operates with symbols rather than numbers entered into the computer; for example, by introducing the variable in integral calculations along with the symbols that enable performing the integral operation, he enabled the computer to execute such operations.^[3] 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.^[80] Between the years 1983–1988, SMP was further developed and marketed commercially by the Los Angeles-based Inference Corp.

In 1983, Wolfram left for the School of Natural Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton according to English Wikipedia, whereas Turkish Wikipedia states that in 1983 he left school and his academic career.^[3,18] By that time, he was no longer interested in particle physics and instead began pursuing investigations into cellular automata, focusing primarily on computer simulations.^[3,18] 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.^[73,72] Wolfram's cellular-automata work received many citations and came to be cited in more than 10,000 papers.^[76] He conjectured that the Rule 110 cellular automaton might be Turing complete, which a research assistant to Wolfram, Matthew Cook, later proved correct.^[74] 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.

By the mid-1980s, Wolfram became more interested in physical simulations and worked on simulations of physical processes (such as turbulent fluid flow) with cellular automata on the Connection Machine alongside Richard Feynman, receiving Feynman's help in the calculation of complex systems during the combination of cellular automata and computer methods and helping to initiate the field of complex systems.^[77] In 1984, he was a participant in the Founding Workshops of the Santa Fe Institute, along with Nobel laureates Murray Gell-Mann, Manfred Eigen, and Philip Warren Anderson, and future laureate Frank Wilczek.^[78] In 1986, he founded the Center for Complex Systems Research (CCSR) at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.^[79] In 1987, he founded the journal Complex Systems.

In 1986, Wolfram left the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where he founded the Center for Complex Systems Research to conduct research on complex systems, and started developing the computer algebra system Mathematica. In 1987, he founded the company Wolfram Research, which continues to develop and market the program.^[7,81] According to English Wikipedia, Mathematica was released on 23 June 1988 when Wolfram left academia, whereas Turkish Wikipedia states that he ended his education and research in 1987 before publishing the first version in 1988 and launching it onto the market.

From 1992 to 2002, Wolfram worked on his book A New Kind of Science (also referred to as A New Branch of Science), which presents an empirical study of simple computational systems and approaches scientific problems with easily understandable computer algorithms. A few of these topics include traditional mathematics and the analysis of mathematics in complex systems, with the work arguing that for fundamental reasons, these types of computational systems rather than traditional mathematics are needed to model and understand complexity in nature. Wolfram concluded that the universe has a discrete or digital nature and operates on fundamental laws that can be described as simple programs, while also attempting to explain gravity through a computer program. He predicted that a realization of this within scientific communities would exert a revolutionary influence on physics, chemistry, biology, and most other scientific disciplines, hence the book's title.

The book was met with skepticism and subjected to criticism across many scientific circles—especially due to its title—with claims that Wolfram took credit for the work of others and reached conclusions without supporting evidence.^[5] Wolfram subsequently attended numerous conferences and talks related to the book.

In March 2009, Wolfram announced Wolfram Alpha, an answer engine, which launched in May 2009 as Wolfram's own search engine.^[84,83] This search engine expanded the information system using different methods and turned it into an easy-to-use interface. In February 2012, a paid-for version with extra features was released—identified in Turkish as the latest version of Wolfram-Alpha—which met with criticism for its high price before it later dropped from $50 to $2.^[84,83]

The engine is based on natural language processing (or a natural programming process) and a large library of rules-based algorithms. Thanks to this extensive library, it offers the opportunity to perform operations by combining a lot of data. In addition, like other search engines, it can direct users to different pages with answers given to the questions asked. The application programming interface allows other applications to extend and enhance Wolfram Alpha.^[86]

In 2010, Wolfram co-founded Touchpress with Theodore Gray, Max Whitby, and John Cromie. The company specialised in creating premium apps and games covering a wide range of educational subjects designed for children, parents, students, and educators. Touchpress published more than 100 apps, though the company is no longer active.^[90]

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, though it was previously available through Mathematica and not an entirely new programming language.^[91] 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, which caused some controversy because of the proprietary nature of the Wolfram Language.^[92,97,11] 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.^[93,94]

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.^[50,10] 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 say his results are non-quantitative and arbitrary.^[95,46]

Wolfram maintains a log of personal analytics dating back to the 1980s, which includes emails received and sent, keystrokes made, meetings and events attended, recordings of phone calls, and even physical movement. In the preface of A New Kind of Science, he noted that he recorded over 100 million keystrokes and 100 mouse miles. He has said that personal analytics "can give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives."^[96]

Wolfram was 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.^[92,97,11]

Early published works include Theory and Applications of Cellular Automata: Including Selected Papers, 1983–1986, published by World Scientific in 1986, followed by the Addison-Wesley titles Mathematica: A System for Doing Mathematics by Computer in 1991 and Cellular Automata and Complexity: Collected Papers in 1994. Subsequent works published by Wolfram Media include A New Kind of Science in 2002, The Mathematica Book in 2003, An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language in 2015, and Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People in 2016, which was featured in Tom Siegfried's August 13, 2016 piece "'Idea Makers' tackles scientific thinkers' big ideas and personal lives Human side of science emphasized in new book" published by the Society for Science & the Public. Wolfram Media also released Adventures of a Computational Explorer in 2019, A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics in 2020, Combinators: A Centennial View in 2021, Metamathematics: Foundations & Physicalization in 2022, and Twenty Years of A New Kind of Science in 2022. Later titles from Wolfram Media include What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work? and The Second Law: Resolving the Mystery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in 2023, Predicting the Eclipse: A Multimillennium Tale of Computation in 2024, as well as On the Nature of Time, What's Really Going On in Machine Learning? Some Minimal Models, and Towards a Computational Formalization for Foundations of Medicine in 2025.

External links related to Stephen Wolfram include his personal website (https://www.stephenwolfram.com/), the Wolfram Foundation, and records identified by 114676, 3358184 (Stephen Wolfram), and 1054. Additionally, an interview of Stephen Wolfram conducted by David Zierler on March 18 and April 17, 2021, is available through the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA (www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/46902).