Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of nearly four decades, he has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking-and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business. Born in London in 1959, Wolfram was educated at Eton, Oxford and Caltech. He published his first scientific paper at the age of 15, and had received his PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of 20. Wolfram's early scientific work was mainly in high-energy physics, quantum field theory and cosmology, and included several now-classic results. Having started to use computers in 1973, Wolfram rapidly became a leader in the emerging field of scientific computing, and in 1979 he began the construction of SMP-the first modern computer algebra system-which he released commercially in