Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram is a British-American computer scientist, physicist and businessman, born in London in 1959, who works in computer algebra and theoretical physics. He was educated at Eton College, entered St. John College, Oxford at seventeen, and received a PhD in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1980. He founded Wolfram Research, where he is chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine, and was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012. He conjectured that the Rule 110 cellular automaton might be Turing complete, which his research assistant Matthew Cook later proved, and he wrote A New Kind of Science.