Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram:
If you give this man a wedgie, he will melt your brain
Everyone who hacks their way beyond algebra in math class winds up having to slog through lessons on some peculiar math tool -- first it was the slide rule, then for my generation it was the graphing calculator. You'd see older kids with the tools of the trade in their backpacks and wonder what the hell you were in for in high school. These days, the common Red Badge of Math Dorkiness for high-school and college students has become virtual -- it's a computer program called Mathematica, a software tool that can actually do math problems for you. Literally -- you can type in your math problem, with all the little x's and weird math symbols, and it will chug away and give you the answer. This ain't no calculator, that only speaks in numbers -- this Mathematica thing will give you back answers to algebra problems, with letters and fractions and all the other little funny math symbols.
That would have been nice back in math class, eh? Well, don't feel too jealous of today's math students -- I guarantee there's an unbathed college student out there right now pulling an all-nighter to finish a Mathematica-based homework assignment. But it really is a remarkable piece of software. And the man behind it all is just the kind of genius you'd expect -- at the age where you and I were pulling all-nighters to write that book report on Brazil, Stephen Wolfram was wrapping up his PhD in physics. He won a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1981 at age 22, barely old enough to drink alcohol, and before the end of the decade he'd founded the software company Wolfram Research to sell Mathematica to students everywhere. After turning this rare double-play (world-class pure research and making it big in the business world), he went off on his own for ten years to create a completely new scientific research path. (Or so he claims -- more on that later.) He essentially spurned publication of his research in traditional scientific journals, instead working in this new area in scientific seclusion until releasing a summation of it all in a gigantic tome called "A New Kind of Science". If that isn't enough, he can bench-press 420 and used to play drums for Peter Gabriel.
Alright, I don't actually know what Stephen Wolfram bench presses (though I would love to see someone have the huevos to ask him), but isn't it enough for a man to create from scratch an entirely new area of science? It's a branch that (if you were to draw all of science as a tree) would stick out somewhere in between computer programming theory, mathematics, chaos theory, and statistical mechanics. It also happens to be a branch that existed before Wolfram's book, that started with a fun little mathematical curiosity called "cellular automata".
Stephen was involved in the early years of cellular automata, published a few papers on the subject, founded a journal -- in all respects was a major player in the field in the early eighties. Then he took his ball and went home. By the time Vanilla Ice was ruling the radio, Stephen Wolfram had disengaged from the research world and stopped publishing his work. From that point on it was more or less him and his computer (running Mathematica) doing work in what he believes to be a new theory of the universe based on cellular automata and similar simple "games". Instead of incrementally publishing his work for everyone to chew on (as everyone else does), he saved it all up for ten years and released it in one giant dollop. And he didn't publish in respected scientific journals (despite that he could get published in the most prestigious journals on reputation alone), instead he went straight to the public with a giant book, written for laymen, cleverly called "A New Kind of Science".
This is not a man who, come Saturday night, will order a Heartburn Lover's pizza with you (Motto: "You'll crap blue flame for three days, or the pizza's free) and watch the Seton Hall game.
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