Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram ( born August 29, 1959 in London ) is a British physicist and mathematician who is known for his research on cellular automata and the design of the software Mathematica.
Life
Stephen Wolfram's Jewish parents fled in 1933 from Westphalia to England. His father Hugo was a writer, his mother Sybil was a professor of philosophy at Oxford.
Tungsten is sometimes referred to as a child prodigy. In 1975 he published at age 15, an article about particle physics. A year later he began his studies in physics at St John's College, Oxford University and continued this in 1978 from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech ) continued. He dealt first with connections between cosmology and elementary particle physics, and later worked in the field of theory of strong interactions. In 1979 he obtained his doctorate at Caltech.
From 1979 to 1981 he led the development of the computer algebra system SMP ( Symbolic Manipulation Program, a previous version of Mathematica) in the Department of Physics at Caltech. Because of a dispute over intellectual property in the context of SMP he left the university.
In 1983 he accepted a position at the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study. There he worked on cellular automata, which he applied to many other areas ( Cryptography and hydrodynamics ). In 1986 he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign and began the development of mathematics software Mathematica, published in June 1988. In 1987, he founded the company Wolfram Research, based in Champaign, IL, marketed and developed the software since then. Wolfram is the CEO and principal shareholder of the company.
In 2002 he released his successful and much-discussed book, A New Kind of Science ( A novel science ), which tries to show with numerous visual examples, the thickness of cellular automata over more traditional mathematical models for the description of nature.
In March 2009, he announced on his blog on the new search engine Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge machine that can calculate answers to questions for the first time to, rather than as fall back to a simple database such as Google. The announcement caused a significant media attention, via Wolfram Alpha hundred newspapers and magazines worldwide was reported in several. The search engine is freely available from the 16th May 2009.
In 2009 he was awarded the Friedrich L. Bauer Prize at the Technical University of Munich. He is since 2012 a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
In April 2013, he published a data analysis of users of the social network Facebook. By means of self-developed software analyzes tungsten ratios and talking points of the parties and presents the results graphically dar.
Works
- A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media Inc., Champaign Ill, 2002. ISBN 1-57955-008-8.
- Two - dimensional cellular automata. in: Journal of Statistical Physics. Dordrecht 38.1985, No. 5-6, 901-946. ISSN 0022-4715