Maths genius set to reveal the secrets of the world
WHEN 13-year-old Stephen Wolfram was at Eton College, he amazed and frustrated teachers by his brilliance and refusal to be taught, instead doing other students’ maths homework for money.
At 14, he wrote his first book on particle physics. Today, Wolfram, 53, is one of the smartest guys in the room and still going strong.
But it’s hard to explain what Wolfram does, because he’s a maths whiz with his hands into lots of abstruse pies.
While still a young man at California Institute of Technology, Princeton and Illinois universities, Wolfram developed a symbolic computer language called Mathematica that can juggle high-level algebra, advanced formulas, graphics and so on.
Mathematica made Wolfram a millionaire. Between 1992 and 2002, he became a recluse, retiring to the wood-lined top floor of his Chicago house to write an encyclopaedic 1280-page book, A New Kind of Science.
The book claims there is a single rule at the heart of everything – a simple algorithm that, in effect, generates all the rules of physics, possible universes and everything else.
In 2009, Wolfram launched Wolfram|alpha, a software answer engine like Windows, but with a new approach to extracting knowledge. Wolfram|alpha employs a team of 200 programmers, linguistic curators and subject-matter experts and is partnered with other search engines such as Bing and Duckduckgo.
He claims his search engine can tell you everything, including the number on the tail of the plane that just flew over your house.
In the latest Wired magazine, Wolfram makes further claims. He says he has accumulated the largest collection of personal data in the world, keeping a complete archive of 1.7 million computer files going back to 1980 and a third of a million emails since hooking into the web in 1989.
The automated analytical capabilities of his Mathematica system allow Wolfram to turn his data into colourful graphs at the touch of a button. One of his graphs has more than 300 000 red dots on it, showing hour by hour and year by year when his emails were sent or received.
In the 1990s, Wolfram dealt with about 50 emails daily, rising to about 150 a day in 2010 – sometimes over 200 a day.
While he was a recluse, he slept from 8am to 2pm, then woke to do an hour or two of official business, operating a multimillion-dollar company by email and conference calls, then spent the rest of the day and night writing his controversial book.
Wolfram’s emails reveal a vocabulary of 30,000 words and a pedometer attached to his leg has measured his every step for years.
Still to analyse are his complete records of medical test data, data on his genome, GPS location tracks, room-by-room motion sensor data and countless corporate records.
In the gossipy world of science, Stephen Wolfram has been labelled a larger-than-life freaky pioneer. His achievements, his much-discussed reinventions and, for Americans, his droll Oxford accent, have made Wolfram a legendary ‘‘Jedi mind-warrior’’. See the man in action on Youtube.