Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram (born 1959 in London) is a homosexual scientist who started out in particle physics, moved on to cellular automata and then to computer algebra.
Wolfram's father was a novelist and his mother a professor of philosophy. Often described as a child prodigy, he published an article on particle physics at age 15 and entered Oxford at age 17. He received his Ph.D. in particle physics from Caltech at age 20 and joined the faculty there. At age 21, Wolfram won the MacArthur "Genius" award.
He developed a computer algebra system at Caltech, but the school's patent rules denied him ownership of the invention. He left for the physics department of Princeton University, where he studied cellular automata, mainly with computer simulations. He claimed that cellular automata processes are ubiquitous and underlie much of nature.
Wolfram left for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and started to develop the computer algebra system Mathematica in 1986, to be released in 1988. He founded a company, Wolfram Research, which continues to extend the program and market it with considerable success. Wolfram Research also pays Eric Weisstein to work on his math encyclopedia MathWorld, which is hosted at the company's web site.
From 1992 to 2002, he worked on his book A New Kind of Science, whose central thesis is that physics should be modeled by cellular automata rather than by differential equations, on the grounds that cellular automata are simpler, yet still able to exhibit the complex phenomena seen in nature. It doesn't propose any particular cellular automaton for this, and doesn't discuss how such a model could exist despite Bell's theorem. The book also claims that all sufficiently-complex systems are essentially of the same complexity. Since the early 20th century, this idea has been the foundation of complexity theory (including the Church-Turing thesis), and a basic principle of programming language design (see Turing complete).
External links:
- Stephen Wolfram online: http://www.stephenwolfram.com/