Stephen Wolfram, Ph.D., Inventor of Mathematica
Today, my guest is Stephen Wolfram, Ph.D., the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the originator of the Wolfram Physics Project; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of more than 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.
Stephen is also the author of A New Kind of Science, a 1200-page book released in 2002 and immediately became a bestseller. Its publication has been seen as initiating a paradigm shift of historic importance in science, with new implications emerging every year. In addition to his corporate leadership, Stephen is deeply involved in the development of the company’s technology, personally overseeing the functional design of the company’s core products on a daily basis, and constantly introducing new ideas and directions. Stephen studied at Eton, Oxford and received his PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of 20.
In this candid conversation, Stephen shared the real stories behind his early rise as a physics prodigy, the decades-long development of his groundbreaking theories, and how he manages his time between leading his company and pursuing basic science.
1. The Teenage Physicist. Stephen revealed that his plan to become a physicist started at age 10, a plan he successfully executed by the time he was 20. Arriving at Caltech as an 18-year-old graduate student, he maintained a highly productive pace of publishing particle physics papers every few weeks by utilizing a “secret weapon”: using computers to do mathematical computation—a tool that other scientists strangely ignored.
2. A Decade-Long Sabbatical. After successfully launching Mathematica, Stephen planned to take a short, year-and-a-half sabbatical to explore how computational rules could model complex natural processes. Instead, he made so many unexpected discoveries that the project stretched into an intense 10.5-year endeavor, culminating in his massive, 1,280-page book, A New Kind of Science, which helped shift scientific modeling away from traditional equations to computational programs.
3. Unlocking Fundamental Physics. Although the physics community initially ignored his computational approach to fundamental theories, Stephen returned to the subject decades later after experiencing a technical breakthrough. Prompted by young physicists, he began working on the topic again in the fall of 2019 and, to his surprise, cracked major foundational questions about how the universe is built underneath by early 2020, ending a nearly 100-year hiatus in foundational physics progress.
4. Hobbies Turning Into Reality. Stephen noted that his idea of fun rarely separates from his work, observing that almost everything he starts as a “hobby” eventually becomes a very real project. Today, his varied hobbies range from advising panicked tech CEOs and mentoring ambitious kids to live-streaming his company’s software design meetings and researching historical scientific biographies, all driven by a deep fascination with problem-solving and understanding the arcs of people’s lives.
