---
title: "Stephen Wolfram"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:07:27.374894+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In March 2014, at the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) event, Wolfram officially announced the Wolfram Language as a new general multi-paradigm programming language, though it was previously available through Mathematica and not an entirely new programming language. The documentation for the language was pre-released in October 2013 to coincide with the bundling of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language on every Raspberry Pi computer with some controversy because of the proprietary nature of the Wolfram Language. While the Wolfram Language has existed for over 30 years as the primary programming language used in Mathematica, it was not officially named until 2014, and is not widely used. 

=== Wolfram Physics Project ===

In April 2020, Wolfram announced the "Wolfram Physics Project" as an effort to reduce and explain all the laws of physics within a paradigm of a hypergraph that is transformed by minimal rewriting rules that obey the Church–Rosser property. The effort is a continuation of the ideas he originally described in A New Kind of Science. Wolfram claims that "From an extremely simple model, we're able to reproduce special relativity, general relativity and the core results of quantum mechanics."
Physicists are generally unimpressed with Wolfram's claim, and say his results are non-quantitative and arbitrary.

== Personal interests and activities ==
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. In the preface of A New Kind of Science, he noted that he recorded over 100 million keystrokes and 100 mouse miles. He has said that personal analytics "can give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives."
Wolfram was a scientific consultant for the 2016 film Arrival. He and his son Christopher Wolfram wrote some of the code featured on screen, such as the code in graphics depicting an analysis of the alien logograms, for which they used the Wolfram Language.

== Bibliography ==
Stephen Wolfram (2025). Towards a Computational Formalization for Foundations of Medicine. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1-57955-108-7.
Stephen Wolfram (2025). What's Really Going On in Machine Learning? Some Minimal Models. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1-57955-107-0.
Stephen Wolfram (2025). On the Nature of Time. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1-57955-103-2.
Stephen Wolfram (2024). Predicting the Eclipse: A Multimillennium Tale of Computation. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1-57955-087-5.
Stephen Wolfram (2023). The Second Law: Resolving the Mystery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1-57955-083-7.
Stephen Wolfram (2023). What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work?. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1-57955-081-3.
Stephen Wolfram (2022). Twenty Years of A New Kind of Science. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1-57955-049-3.
Stephen Wolfram (2022). Metamathematics: Foundations & Physicalization. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1-57955-076-9.
Stephen Wolfram (2021). Combinators: A Centennial View. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1-57955-043-1.
Stephen Wolfram (2020). A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1-57955-035-6.
Stephen Wolfram (2019). Adventures of a Computational Explorer. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1-57955-026-4.
Stephen Wolfram (2016). Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1-57955-003-5. 
Stephen Wolfram (2015). An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1-944183-05-9. 
Stephen Wolfram (2003). The Mathematica Book (5th ed.). Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1579550226.
Stephen Wolfram (2002). A New Kind of Science. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram Media. ISBN 978-1579550080. OCLC 47831356.
Stephen Wolfram (1994). Cellular Automata and Complexity: Collected Papers. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0201626643.
Stephen Wolfram (1991). Mathematica: A System for Doing Mathematics by Computer. Redwood City, California: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0201515022.
Stephen Wolfram, ed. (1986). Theory and Applications of Cellular Automata: Including Selected Papers, 1983–1986. Singapore: World Scientific. ISBN 978-9971501235.

== References ==

== External links ==

Official website
Wolfram Foundation
Stephen Wolfram at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
Stephen Wolfram at IMDb
Stephen Wolfram at TED 
Stephen Wolfram   on Charlie Rose
Works by Stephen Wolfram at Open Library 
Interview of Stephen Wolfram by David Zierler on March 18 and April 17, 2021, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA, www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/46902