Originals

Stephen Wolfram is not your typical scientist. He was a child prodigy. By age 20, he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech. At age 21, he became the youngest person ever to receive the MacArthur Award, better known as the "genius grant.” By the early 80s, still in his 20s, Wolfram decided to focus on computer science, an area of study he had simultaneously been pursuing—first at Caltech, and then at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the academic home of some of the world's greatest minds, such as Einstein and John von Neumann, a pioneer of modern computing.

Wolfram's goal was straightforward: He would run simple computer programs and see what happens.The result? Well, it would lead Wolfram to change his entire view of science, and based on his discoveries, he would not only launch a leading, American multinational computing company, Wolfram Research, but present his vision for a new kind of science to the world.

What is this new kind of science? You see, for the last 300 hundred years, science has used mathematical equations to understand the natural world. But Wolfram asked the question: "What if we didn't base science on mathematical equations but on computer programs instead?” After more than a decade of unleashing simple computer programs to see how they would behave—what's technically called "cellular automata"—Wolfram discovered—with great surprise—that they produced complexity, the complexity that we see in nature.In a 4.8 pound, 1,280-page book appropriately titled, A New Kind of Science, Wolfram published his scientific discovery. That was 23 years ago, and now, the use of computer programs to model nature has become the norm. What was considered "impossible" has become obvious.

If you're outside the world of science, there's a chance that you might not know who Stephen Wolfram is. But if you ever asked Siri or Alexa a math or science question over the years—it's likely that Stephen Wolfram’s software provided the answer. In fact, his "answer engine," a large language machine (LLM) known as Wolfram Alpha, is used by numerous companies and educators, and his technical software program, Mathematica, has been used by scientists and engineers for the last 37 years.

As the world enters a new era of machine learning, The Futurist NYC sat down with the man who had the foresight and courage to challenge the science establishment and help usher in a new paradigm, a new science, that recognizes everything is computation. 

​

Worth the watch. 

​​