Stephen Wolfram - Biography

Biography

Stephen Wolfram's parents were Jewish refugees who emigrated from Westphalia, Germany, to England in 1933. Wolfram's father Hugo was a textile manufacturer and novelist (Into a Neutral Country) and his mother Sybil was a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. He has a younger brother, Conrad.

Wolfram was educated at Eton, where he amazed and frustrated teachers by his brilliance and refusal to be taught, instead doing other students' mathematics homework for money. Wolfram published an article on particle physics but claimed to be bored and left Eton prematurely in 1976. He entered St John's College, Oxford at age 17 but found lectures "awful". Working independently, Wolfram published a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 18 and nine other papers before leaving in 1978 without graduating. He received a Ph.D. in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology at age 20, joined the faculty there and received one of the first MacArthur awards in 1981, at age 21. According to Google Scholar, Stephen Wolfram is cited by over 30,000 publications (up to April 2012) and has an h-index of 58.

Wolfram's work with Geoffrey Fox on the theory of the strong interaction is still used today in experimental particle physics. Wolfram is married to a mathematician and has four children.

Wolfram presented a talk at the TED conference in 2010, and he was named Speaker of the Event for his 2012 talk at SXSW.