Wolfram, Stephen
Oral history interview with Stephen Wolfram, 2021 March 18 and April 17.
Interview with Stephen Wolfram, Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. He describes his recent efforts to launch an assault on the final theory of physics and he muses on the possibility that the human mind is a quantum mechanical system. Wolfram recounts his familys German-Jewish heritage and his upbringing in Oxford, where his mother was an academic. He describes his schooling which put him on a trajectory to skip grades and begin college at age fifteen and to complete his PhD at age twenty. Wolfram discusses his early interests in particle theory and computer systems and he describes his summer research visit to Argonne Lab and his visit with David Gross at Princeton. He explains the circumstances that led to his admission at Caltech to work on QCD and his decision to accept a faculty appointment at Caltech thereafter. Wolfram narrates the origins of the SMP program and the intellectual property issues he experienced as a Caltech professor. He explains his intellectual migration away from physics toward the work that would become Mathematica and Wolfram Language, and he describes his time at the Institute for Advanced Study. Wolfram discusses the business model he adopted for Mathematica and his educational motivations that were incorporated into the program from its inception. He discusses his interests in complex system research and his fascination with cellular automata, and he narrates the intellectual process that led to his book "A New Kind of Science". Wolfram surveys the reviews, positive and negative, that he has received for this work, and he offers a retrospective look at how NKS has held up as it approaches its twentieth anniversary. He describes the launch of Wolfram Alpha and the promises and limits of quantum computing and why he has returned to physics in recent years. At the end of the interview, Wolfram asserts that he has never taken risk in any of his decisions, and he considers how his approach and the intellectual and business ventures he has pursued will continue to yield solutions for many of the ongoing and seemingly intractable problems in physics.
Stephen Wolfram is a physicist and computer scientist, and he is the Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Wolfram completed his graduate studies at California Institute of Technology and has conducted research at places such as the Institute of Advanced Study and Argonne Lab.
Feynman, Richard P. (Richard Phillips), 1918-1988
Field, R. D. (Richard D.)
Gell-Mann, Murray
Gross, D. (David Jonathan)
Hasslacher, Brosl
Llewellyn Smith, Christopher H.
Wolfram, Stephen
Argonne National Laboratory
California Institute of Technology
Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, N.J.)
Princeton University
Wolfram Research (Firm)
Cellular automata.
Computer software -- Congresses.
Particle physics. gtt
Quantum chromodynamics
Quantum computing.
Quantum field theory
Interviews. aat
Oral histories. aat
Transcripts. aat
Zierler, David, 1979- interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
American Institute of Physics. Niels Bohr Library & Archives. One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740, USA