Stephen Wolfram (/ˈwʊlfrəm/ WUUL-frəm; born 29 August 1959) is a British-American[6] computer scientist, physicist, and businessman.

[16] He entered St. John's College, Oxford, at age 17 and left in 1978[17] without graduating[18][19] to attend the California Institute of Technology the following year, where he received a PhD[20] in particle physics in 1980.

[23] Following his PhD, Wolfram joined the faculty at Caltech and became the youngest recipient[24] of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, at age 21.

[25] He conjectured that the Rule 110 cellular automaton might be Turing complete, which a research assistant to Wolfram, Matthew Cook, later proved correct.

[28] In the mid-1980s, Wolfram worked on simulations of physical processes (such as turbulent fluid flow) with cellular automata on the Connection Machine alongside Richard Feynman[29] and helped initiate the field of complex systems.

[31] Wolfram led the development of the computer algebra system SMP (Symbolic Manipulation Program) in the Caltech physics department during 1979–1981.

A dispute with the administration over the intellectual property rights regarding SMP—patents, copyright, and faculty involvement in commercial ventures—eventually led him to resign from Caltech.

[5] From 1992 to 2002, Wolfram worked on his controversial book A New Kind of Science,[5][33] which presents an empirical study of simple computational systems.

Additionally, it argues that for fundamental reasons these types of systems, rather than traditional mathematics, are needed to model and understand complexity in nature.

The book was met with skepticism and criticism that Wolfram took credit for the work of others and made conclusions without evidence to support them.

[47][48] Wolfram has a log of personal analytics, including emails received and sent, keystrokes made, meetings and events attended, recordings of phone calls, and even physical movement dating back to the 1980s.