creators

Stephen Wolfram: founder and CEO of Wolfram Research

Stephen Wolfram founded Wolfram Research in 1987 and created Mathematica, the Wolfram Language and Wolfram|Alpha. Version 15 shipped in June 2026.

Stephen Wolfram is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the company he started in 1987 and built around Mathematica, the Wolfram Language and the Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine, released in May 2009. Born in London in 1959, he was educated at Eton, Oxford and Caltech, had a PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of 20, and in 1981 became, by his own account, the youngest recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. In the 1990s he stepped back from day-to-day company work for independent research, which produced the 1,200-page A New Kind of Science, released on 14 May 2002, arguing that simple computational rules underlie complex natural phenomena. He has continued that line of work through the Wolfram Physics Project, launched in 2020. After the rise of large language models he wrote the explainer What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work? (Wolfram Media, March 2023) and worked on connecting Wolfram|Alpha's computation to chatbots. On 16 June 2026, almost 38 years after Mathematica 1.0, he launched Version 15 of the Wolfram Language and Mathematica, announced as bringing built-in AI and new core functionality. He writes long-form essays on computation, AI and the history of science at writings.stephenwolfram.com.

Specialization

computational science, symbolic computation, computational knowledge systems, cellular automata

Country

United States