Our Faculty
Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram is the author of A New Kind of Science and the principal lecturer at the Summer School. He is the creator of Mathematica, the creator of Wolfram|Alpha and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Having started in science as a teenager (he got his PhD at age 20), Wolfram had a highly successful early career in academia. He began his work on NKS in 1981 and spent ten years writing the NKS book, published in 2002. Over the course of 30 years, Wolfram has mentored a large number of individuals who have achieved great success in academia, business and elsewhere. Starting the NKS Summer School (now called the Wolfram Summer School) was his first formal educational undertaking in 16 years.Directors
Xerxes Arsiwalla
Fundamental Physics Director
Xerxes is a theoretical physicist. He worked on black holes and string theory during grad school. He did his postdoctoral research in computational neuroscience and complex systems. In addition to fundamental physics, he is interested in the philosophy and foundations of mathematics. He also maintains an interest in the problem of consciousness and intelligence, particularly in mathematical approaches to the mind-body problem.
Mads Bahrami
Science & Tech Director
Mads Bahrami joined Wolfram in 2018. He is interested in developing computational paradigm for any field of research, in particular, STEM education, religion, etc. Mads received his PhD in physical chemistry from Sharif University of Technology. His field of research is the foundation of quantum theory and quantum stochastic processes. He did his postdoctoral research in the EU under a Marie Curie fellowship and also in the US at the University of California, Riverside. Mads is also a lecturer of general chemistry, physical chemistry and quantum theory at different universities and community colleges in Los Angeles.
Hatem Elshatlawy
Fundamental Physics Assistant Director
Hatem joined Wolfram Research in 2020 as one of the research managers of the Wolfram Physics Project and was a participant in the Wolfram Summer School (Fundamental Physics track) in 2020. He studied theoretical physics at the University of Freiburg, the University of Vienna and RWTH Aachen University. Currently, he is based at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. In addition to fundamental physics, he is interested in the history, philosophy and foundations of mathematics.
Robert Mendelsohn
Science & Tech Assistant Director
Robert Mendelsohn joined Wolfram Research in 2019 and was a participant in the Wolfram Summer School in 2014. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Texas in 2019. He has worked for Heartland Payment Systems, Nokia and several defense contractors in areas related to cryptography and cybersecurity.
James Douglas Boyd
Metamathematics Director
James Douglas Boyd is a product manager at Wolfram Research and a research scientist with the Wolfram Physics Project. His primary research foci include the foundations of multicomputation and their myriad applications. He is an alumnus of the Wolfram Summer School (Fundamental Physics track). He currently lives in Mountain View, California.
Catherine Boucher
Program Director
Catherine Boucher joined Wolfram Research in 1998. She led project management during the production of A New Kind of Science and is currently the director of special projects for Wolfram Research. Her team is responsible for early development of new initiatives at Wolfram Research, along with projects related to Wolfram Science. She and her team led the original development of Wolfram|Alpha and currently handle its mathematical content and parser development. Catherine received her PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in cluster analysis.
Kyle Keane
Program Director
Kyle Keane is currently a full-time lecturer at MIT and part-time consultant at Wolfram in the Technical Communications and Strategy Group. Kyle was a research programmer in the Special Projects Department of Wolfram Research from 2012–2015, where he worked on establishing K–12 programming initiatives, including developing a general step-by-step physics and equation solver in Wolfram|Alpha and helping Siri speak Wolfram|Alpha results. His main areas of interest are the pedagogical effectiveness of interactive graphics, evidence-based infusion of programming into science education, improving the accessibility of technology for people with disabilities and user experience. Kyle has a PhD from the University of California, Riverside, where his dissertation was on utilizing weak quantum measurements to protect quantum systems from information loss during quantum computing.
Lizzie Turner
Program Director
Lizzie joined Wolfram Research in 2014. She is currently the team manager and a technical project manager for Wolfram's Advanced Research Group, working from the company headquarters in Champaign, Illinois. This is her first year as program director of the Wolfram Summer Programs, and she participated last year as well. She is excited to share in this experience and make it valuable and memorable for everyone involved. In her spare time, she enjoys music and playing piano, traveling, shopping for unique trinkets, video games and learning about new technology. She has a BSc in applied mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Paul Abbott
Program Director
Paul Abbott is an adjunct professor at the University of Western Australia. He obtained his PhD in theoretical atomic physics from UWA in 1987, worked for Wolfram Research from 1989–1992 and has been a Wolfram consultant and instructor since 1997. Paul was the founding technical editor of The Mathematical Journal in 1990 and was a columnist until 2010. His interests range from computational physics, applied mathematics and special functions to courseware design. All of his research and teaching since 1985 has used Wolfram technologies in some way, and his work has been recognized most recently by a Wolfram Innovator Award in 2015 and an Australian University Teaching Award in 2016. In his spare time, Paul enjoys cycling, walking, swimming, photography, reading and writing.
John Dixon
Academic Director
John Dixon received his PhD in the history of American civilization from Harvard University in 2014. His dissertation unveiled the rich human geography of the eighteenth-century Atlantic Ocean through digital mapping and analysis of ships' logbooks. He joined Wolfram Research in 2015 after a stint at HarvardX working on a MOOC emphasizing interdisciplinary inquiry through material culture. As assistant to Stephen Wolfram, he coordinates Wolfram's newest educational efforts in computational thinking, contributes expertise to the development of new and existing educational products and is involved with various special projects in education and the humanities. John also holds a BA in history and a BS in ceramic and materials engineering from Clemson University.
Paul Abbott
Academic Director
Paul Abbott is an adjunct professor at the University of Western Australia. He obtained his PhD in theoretical atomic physics from UWA in 1987, worked for Wolfram Research from 1989–1992 and has been a Wolfram consultant and instructor since 1997. Paul was the founding technical editor of The Mathematical Journal in 1990 and was a columnist until 2010. His interests range from computational physics, applied mathematics and special functions to courseware design. All of his research and teaching since 1985 has used Wolfram technologies in some way, and his work has been recognized most recently by a Wolfram Innovator Award in 2015 and an Australian University Teaching Award in 2016. In his spare time, Paul enjoys cycling, walking, swimming, photography, reading and writing.
Todd Rowland
Academic Director
Todd Rowland assisted Stephen Wolfram with mathematical issues found in A New Kind of Science chapters 5, 9 and 12. Before joining the NKS team in 2001, he wrote entries for MathWorld. Todd received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1999, where he studied traditional mathematics, such as algebraic and differential geometry. Currently, he is the managing editor of Complex Systems . His interests include the fundamental theory of physics, and more recently education, both NKS and the Wolfram Language.
Presentations
Vitaliy Kaurov
Academic Director
Vitaliy Kaurov joined the Technical Communications and Strategy Group at Wolfram Research in 2010. He has given numerous talks at universities, research labs, companies and conferences around the world, educating people on how Wolfram technologies empower academics and industries, governments and individuals. Vitaliy is involved with international business development, oversees Wolfram Community, writes for the Wolfram Blog, is a faculty member at the Wolfram Summer School and helps with many other Wolfram initiatives. Vitaliy received his PhD in theoretical physics from the City University of New York in the area of ultra-cold quantum gases, and also worked in the fields of complex systems and nonlinear dynamics. He collaborated in National Science Foundation–sponsored research, was a professor at the College of Staten Island and served as an organizer and chair at American Physical Society conferences. Wolfram technologies helped Vitaliy to discover novel scientific ideas and develop innovative educational solutions.
Jonathan Gorard
Physics Track Director
Jonathan Gorard is a research mathematician at the University of Cambridge, where he works on a variety of problems related to the intersection of mathematics, physics and computation; having published his first scientific paper at 17, his published work now covers topics ranging from computational complexity theory, combinatorics and cosmology to general relativity, mathematical logic and the foundations of quantum mechanics to cellular automata, complex systems and quantum computation. Since 2017, he has also worked as a mathematical consultant for Wolfram Research, Inc., leading the development of Wolfram Language’s automated theorem-proving and quantum-computing frameworks and working on various related areas, such as semantic representation of mathematics, symbolic logic, discrete-state quantum mechanics and graph theory. He is also one of the principal researchers on the Wolfram Physics Project, having made several key contributions to the mathematical formalism of the Wolfram model (particularly in regards to the derivations of general relativity and quantum mechanics and its connections to quantum information theory); he has also done extensive algorithms development work for the Physics Project, particularly in relation to multiway evolution, hypergraph isomorphism testing, causal graph computation, causal invariance testing and the application of automated theorem-proving techniques. He attended the Wolfram Summer School as a student in 2017 and has been an instructor since 2018.Mads Bahrami
Assistant Academic Director
Mads Bahrami joined Wolfram in 2018. He is interested in developing computational paradigm for any field of research, in particular, STEM education, religion, etc. Mads received his PhD in physical chemistry from Sharif University of Technology. His field of research is the foundation of quantum theory and quantum stochastic processes. He did his postdoctoral research in the EU under a Marie Curie fellowship and also in the US at the University of California, Riverside. Mads is also a lecturer of general chemistry, physical chemistry and quantum theory at different universities and community colleges in Los Angeles.
Abigail Devereaux
Event Director
Abigail Devereaux joined Wolfram Research in 2007. She has a bachelor's degree in physics (2004) and a master's degree in mathematics (2007) from Boston University and is currently a Mercatus PhD Fellow in economics at George Mason University. She was involved in the Wolfram Science Summer School from 2008–2015 as event director, as a participant in 2008 and 2010, as a teaching assistant in 2011 and as an instructor from 2012–2015. Her presentation on cellular automata over graph topologies at the 2008 Midwest NKS Conference was later written into an article and published in Complex Systems . In her spare time she sings operatic soprano and writes speculative fiction.
Alison Kimball
Program Coordinator
Alison Kimball has a bachelor's degree from Bates College where she majored in mathematics and religious studies. She's been at Wolfram for about a year now as the program coordinator in the Special Projects department. One of her favorite parts of her job is teaching Wolfram Language coding classes in the Boston area. In her spare time, Alison enjoys skiing and playing tennis.
Andrea Griffin
Program Coordinator
After attending the Wolfram Summer School in 2016, Andrea joined Wolfram Research as the Special Projects department's office administrator. She received a bachelor of arts in applied physics with minors in mathematics and secondary education from Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 2014 and a master of science in computer science from Rivier University in Nashua, New Hampshire, in 2016. Andrea has spent several years teaching students from young to old in a wide variety of subjects and in many settings. When she is not managing the office, Andrea spends her time at Wolfram utilizing her background to contribute to education-based efforts in the Special Projects department.
Emily Carter
Program Coordinator
Emily is a program coordinator with a widely varied skill set that includes public relations, event management, workforce development, education and training, and behavioral psychology. She’s also a geek whose hobbies include building gaming rigs, playing D&D, driving fast cars and hiking in the woods of the Appalachian Mountains.
Perri Bennett
Program Coordinator
Perri joined Wolfram Research in 2014. She has a bachelor's degree in communications from Suffolk University (2013). She assisted as program coordinator for the 2014 Wolfram Science Summer School and is excited to be back for her second year. Aside from her duties at Wolfram, she is an avid karaoke enthusiast and enjoys playing ice hockey.
Swede White
Public Relations
Swede White manages public relations at Wolfram Research and is an alumnus of the Wolfram Summer School. Swede helps audiences understand the innovative things people can accomplish with Wolfram’s technology through thought leadership programs, social media campaigns, and earned media placements in outlets like WIRED, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Business Insider, and others. Prior to joining Wolfram, Swede worked in broadcast journalism and attended graduate school at Louisiana State University studying sociology. Swede’s research interests include applying sociological theory to practical communications projects using computational methodologies in Wolfram Language, including natural language processing and network analysis. Specifically, he examines the relationship between identity formation and online communities. He’s also written for VICE, reported for the NPR Newscast Unit, and presented research at academic conferences ranging from computational social science to masculinities and criminology.Instructors
Adiba Shaikh
Instructors
Adiba is a PhD student at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. She is interested in working with various high-energy physics topics, particularly in QCD/strong interaction, like heavy flavor dynamics and QCD at finite temperatures. She is enthusiastic about engaging in teaching initiatives for undergraduate and postgraduate students. Adiba is an alumna of the Wolfram India Data Science School (2022) and the Fundamental Science Winter School (2023). She was a mentor at the Wolfram High School Summer Research Program (2022) and has been a consultant since 2023.
Ahmed Elbanna
Instructors
Ahmed Elbanna is a lecturer and researcher at Tanta University, Egypt. He obtained his PhD in mathematical statistics in 2018 from Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary. His research focuses on networks, random graphs, data analysis and modeling. He started to develop his passion for the Wolfram Language back in 2012 and has been using it ever since in his research and courses. Currently he is a certified instructor for the Wolfram Language and organizes training workshops to teach it.
Alec Titterton
Instructors
Alec Titterton is the content development manager for computerbasedmath.org responsible for taking the vision for a problem-solving, computer-based curriculum and turning it into ready-to-use classroom resources and activities. Alec was previously the national coordinator for Mathematics and Computing specialist schools in the UK, using all of the experience gained from teaching in secondary schools for 16 years. Alec holds a degree in electronic and computer engineering from Birmingham and a PGCE from Cambridge University.
Alejandra Ortiz
Instructors
Alejandra Ortiz is an applied mathematician currently working at Wolfram in the Discrete Computation team as a Computational Graphs & Geometry Developer. She holds a multidisciplinary bachelor’s degree in Technology from the Center of Applied Physics and Advanced Technology, a master’s degree in Mathematics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Mathematical Biology. Her research and computational interests span a wide range of areas, with a particular focus on discrete mathematics, graph theory, and mathematical modeling of natural and social phenomena. Alongside her academic pursuits, Alejandra is also a big fan of museums, movies, gardening, and hiking.
Alessandro Pisana
Instructors
Alessandro is a master’s student in the physics of the fundamental interactions at the Università degli Studi di Padova, where he also received his bachelor’s degree, and an Erasmus alumnus at Aix-Marseille University. His interests are in quantum gravity and quantum information. He is also fascinated by mathematical topics related to physics, such as algebraic geometry, differential geometry and non-commutative geometry.
AnneMarie Torresen
Instructors
AnneMarie Torresen is a developer on the Wolfram|Alpha Math Content team, where she creates and improves math content for the Wolfram|Alpha website and Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition. She holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in teaching secondary mathematics. Before joining Wolfram, AnneMarie worked as a high-school math teacher. She enjoys cooking, composting, printmaking and making math engaging for diverse audiences.
Bernat Espigulé Pons
Instructors
Bernat Espigulé Pons is the author of a Wolfram Notebook-based website that guides its visitors around the forest of symmetric fractal trees. Equipped with Mathematica, Bernat has discovered and mapped the generalized families of self-contacting symmetric fractal trees. His main results were presented in two papers, at the Bridges Conference and the Symmetry Festival 2013. He also attended the Wolfram Science Summer School 2013, where he generalized the equations he had found for two-dimensional fractal trees into the 3D space. After this great experience, he decided to join Wolfram Research and work remotely from home in Barcelona. In 2012, Bernat received a BSc in physics from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He completed the last two years of his studies abroad, first as an EAP student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, 2010–2011, and then as an ERASMUS student at Universität Heidelberg, Germany, 2011–2012. His strong interest in the study of complex systems started in high school, where he developed a research project about geometry and nature. From past to present, his interests are: fractal geometry, chaos theory, fractal spacetime, complex networks, nonlinear phenomena, morphogenesis, dynamical systems, topology, complex oscillations, fractal trees and NKS. Bernat’s other interests are photography, hiking, surfing, couchsurfing, capoeira, architecture, generative art, education and, more recently, the art of 3D printing. He also enjoys receiving feedback from his left-handed twin brother who is doing research in physics, and his younger sister majoring in math.
Carlo Barbieri
Instructors
Carlo Barbieri holds a PhD in physics from ENS in Paris. His current research interests are on the boundary between physics, biology and informatics. During his thesis "Inverse problems in biophysics," he worked on developing algorithms to extract biologically relevant information from biophysics experiments such as DNA micromanipulation or neural activity recordings. He spent one year as a visiting PhD student at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He earned a master's in physics from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", in his hometown, focusing on Boolean satisfiability and the statistical physics of complex systems.
He now works for Wolfram in the Advanced Research Group, and has developed the automated data analysis functionality for Wolfram|Alpha. He now works on Wolfram Cloud features such as instant forms and APIs. He is a music lover, an avid traveler and a bike maniac. He finds it weird to talk about himself in the third person.
Charlie Brummitt
Instructors
Charlie Brummitt is an applied-math postdoc at Columbia University, where he is using mathematical modeling, machine learning and data science to study systemic risk, economic development and various kinds of complex systems. He attended the 2009 Summer School, after which his project (on boundaries of cellular automata) was expanded and published in collaboration with Eric Rowland. He has contributed to Wolfram|Alpha some content on nonlinear dynamics and cellular automata.
Christian Pasquel
Instructors
Christian Pasquel was part of the first group to join the Wolfram Research South America team in Lima, Peru, back in 2012. He has a physics background and worked on research during his first professional years. He currently manages the South America Connectivity group, working on connecting the Wolfram Language to external services and making blockchain and cryptocurrency data computable. His interests include evolutionary biology, astrobiology, artificial intelligence, music, films, books, playing with data and everything tech related. A self-proclaimed Wolfram fan, he enjoys livecoding and works on generative art projects using Mathematica. He is a cat lover and had the main part in an official music video available online.
Christopher Wolfram
Instructors
Christopher Wolfram is a full-stack programmer and algorithm developer who has been programming in Wolfram Language since a young age. He has been the lead developer for several built-in Wolfram Language functions (including Nearest and Encrypt), as well as for Tweet-a-Program and several of his own apps. He has presented at SXSW, Maker Faire, livecoding.tv and other venues on topics such as machine learning, data science and IoT programming. Christopher enjoys 3D modeling, Haskell, Swift, history, tennis and traveling. He has been a mentor for the Wolfram Summer Programs for five years.
Connor Gray
Instructors
Connor Gray is a software developer on the Engine Connectivity Engineering team, having joined Wolfram Research in 2016 as an intern on the Wolfram Compiler project. His work is currently focused on building tooling for authoring Wolfram paclets, maintaining WSTP (Wolfram Symbolic Transfer Protocol) and developing the next-generation Wolfram Language package format. He is interested in compiler technology, software tooling and development processes, and API and user interface design. In his free time, he enjoys reading, having deeply nested conversations, improving his personal organizer system, entertaining thoughts on practical idealism and thinking about how to leverage proven communication mediums (notebooks, essays, checklists, etc.) and reliable technology in new and meaningful ways to improve effectiveness and well-being.
Conrad Wolfram
Instructors
Conrad Wolfram has been strategic director and European cofounder/CEO of Wolfram Research—the “math company” behind Mathematica, Wolfram Language and Wolfram|Alpha (which powers knowledge answers for Apple’s Siri)—for over 30 years. Conrad is also a leading advocate for a fundamental shift of math education to become computer based or alternatively introduce a new core subject of computational thinking. He founded computerbasedmath.org and computationalthinking.org to fundamentally fix math education for the AI age—rebuilding the curriculum assuming computers exist. The movement is now a worldwide force in re-engineering the STEM curriculum. His groundbreaking book The Math(s) Fix: An Education Blueprint for the AI Age was released on June 10, 2020. He holds degrees in natural sciences and math from the University of Cambridge.
Daavid Väänänen
Instructors
Daavid Väänänen has a passion for advancing humanity by improving accessibility to high-quality education and applying emerging technologies to enhance organizational excellence and life quality for all. Since attending the Wolfram Summer School in 2017, he has been advocating and developing Wolfram Language–based resources as a Wolfram Community Ambassador, particularly with the Wolfram Foundation’s Computational Thinking Initiatives. He holds a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. As a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University, he continued research on nonlinear dynamics of many-body quantum systems applied to astrophysical environments, as well as promoted educational outreach and public engagement. He also holds a group fitness instructor certificate and enjoys yoga, rock climbing, gardening and other outdoor activities. He firmly believes that by acting together, our persistent efforts will be able to transfer our optimistic ideas into positive realities for all people.
Daniel George
Instructors
Daniel has six years of industry experience leading applied AI teams at Google X and JPMorgan Chase, specializing in deep learning for time series,natural language processing and generative AI. Prior to that, he pioneered the application of deep learning for detecting gravitational waves from black hole mergers as a member of the Nobel-prize-winning LIGO team. Daniel completed his PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018 and his bachelor’s degree from IIT Bombay in 2015. He has also worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Center of Supercomputing Applications on high-performance computing. He has won the ACM Graduate Student Research Competition, the LSST Data Science Fellowship and the NVIDIA Fellowship. Daniel was a student at the Wolfram Summer School in 2017 and then worked at Wolfram Research for a year, applying deep learning for natural language understanding to improve Wolfram|Alpha. He has been a hardcore user of Wolfram Language and Mathematica since 2013. Daniel has been living in hotels for the last three years while traveling to over 25 countries as a digital nomad.
Daniel Robinson
Instructors
Daniel Robinson is a technical content author at Wolfram Research Europe. He works primarily for Computer-Based Maths (a daughter company to Wolfram), helping to develop computational thinking content, but also delivers Wolfram Language webinars for Wolfram U. In his spare time, he enjoys speed cubing, field hockey, programming and playing the piano. Daniel received a master’s in mathematics from the University of Surrey in 2017.
Dariia Porechna
Instructors
Dariia Porechna was born and grew up in the beautiful city of Kyiv, Ukraine. In 2016, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in applied maths and cryptology at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. Her graduation project was an attempt to attack the Kuznyechik cipher with differential cryptanalysis. Recently she contributed to research in the field of elliptic curves. Dariia fell deeply in love with the Wolfram Language in early 2015 and attended the Summer School as a student the same year. After graduation, she joined the Wolfram|Alpha team as a part of the localization project. Aside from working, she loves self discovery, reading books and traveling, especially taking long walks around cities and enjoying the ocean views.
David Reiss
Instructors
David Reiss has been involved with Mathematica in one way or another since before it was born. As a graduate student at Caltech, another new grad student introduced him and others to Macsyma, which they used by connecting a 300-baud modem on a dial-up line via the ARPANET to a PDP-11 at MIT. With his thesis done in theoretical physics, he then went on an adventure-filled path through several postdocs, a government R&D laboratory, assorted other companies, some startups, working for that other grad student as his scientific communication director for A New Kind of Science and, these days, doing a variety of consulting work mainly using Mathematica. His approach to doing science is to plead ignorance about whatever problem is posed to him and then just dive in. Mathematica is his ideal tool for this. He lives in the Boston area and has a parrot with a very limited vocabulary and a college-age daughter with a vast vocabulary. His is somewhere in between.
Dorian Birraux
Instructors
Dorian Birraux received his master's degree in statistical physics in Paris in 2008. At Wolfram Research, he works on database-related projects and persistent storage solutions in the Advanced Research Group. He is interested in a bit of everything—technology and sciences, music, cinema and traveling. He also enjoys teaching.
Ed Pegg Jr.
Instructors
Ed Pegg Jr. was a research assistant to Stephen Wolfram during the production of A New Kind of Science and helped with topics ranging from bismuth crystals and leaves to Diophantine equations and CA constructions. Prior to this, Ed received a master's degree in mathematics from the University of Colorado. He is a full-time employee of Wolfram Research, primarily involved in work on MathWorld and the Wolfram Library Archive. In his spare time, he works on mathpuzzle.com and is a columnist for the Mathematical Association of America.
Presentations
Enrique Zeleny
Instructors
Enrique Zeleny is a physicist from the Autonomous University of Puebla with a master's degree in quantum cosmology. He attended the NKS Summer School 2005, with a project about causal networks generated by Turing machines. He researched recursive sequences and Turing machines and prepared artwork for the NKS Conferences in 2006 and 2007. Currently, he contributes actively to the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, with nearly a hundred Demonstrations in a variety of subjects from designs for neckties and stalactites formation to chaos in black holes, including some research in NKS systems.
Eric Rowland
Instructors
Eric Rowland is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Hofstra University. He received his PhD from Rutgers University and held postdoctoral positions in the US, Canada and Belgium. He has coauthored over 30 research papers on topics in number theory, combinatorics and theoretical computer science, including several concerning cellular automata. In 2008 he proved that a simple recurrence discovered at the Summer School generates primes. He also develops mathematics content for Wolfram|Alpha.
Erin Craig
Instructors
Erin Craig graduated from New College of Florida with a BA in mathematics. Inspired by the beauty of both algebra and automata, she spent her final year of college at University of California, Berkeley exploring an extension of rule 90 to cellular automata over non-Abelian groups. Erin attended the NKS Summer School in 2009, where she explored reducibility of string substitution systems. She joined Wolfram Research as a software developer in 2009.
Etienne Bernard
Instructors
Etienne Bernard is the lead developer of the Machine Learning Group at Wolfram Research, where he focuses on developing machine learning functionalities for the Wolfram Language. His work aims to simplify the practice of machine learning in order to spread its usage. Etienne obtained a PhD in physics from ENS Paris, where he designed Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms to solve physics problems. He also worked as a postdoctoral scholar at MIT on Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms and non-equilibrium statistical physics.
Fez Zaman
Instructors
Fez works full time as a lexical programmer at Wolfram|Alpha. He has a BS in cognitive science from SUNY Oswego, where he also minored in computer science and audio production and design. His work centers around music, programming, the computational arts and the philosophy of mind. He attended the Wolfram Summer School in 2016 and 2018, and after joining Wolfram|Alpha, he mentored at the Wolfram High School Summer Camp in 2019 and 2020.
Flip Phillips
Instructors
Frederico Meinberg
Instructors
Frederico Meinberg was born in Brazil and did his studies at Freiburg University, Germany, from which he holds a master's degree in romance philology. His primary field of research was linguistic typology, the study of the variety among grammatical structures across the world's languages. He also has interests in computer science, economics and the philosophy of science. Fred attended the first NKS Summer School, in 2003, where he completed a project in pure NKS investigating the properties of symbolic systems. After he finished his MA, Fred joined Wolfram Research as an R&D fellow, and he served as a research associate at the organization's Boston Special Projects Office.
Garrett Ducharme
Instructors
Garrett Ducharme earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with a computer science minor at the University of Illinois, located in Champaign, Illinois. Garrett has been with Wolfram Research since May 2015. He works mostly on paclets that may require lower-level C/C++. A few projects he is currently working on include WolframScript, ExternalEvaluate, ProcessLink (RunProcess, StartProcess, SystemProcesses), SSH (RemoteConnect, RemoteRunProcess), NetworkPacketCapture and ReadByteArray.
In his free time, he enjoys 3D printing, designing circuits and programming for his own small projects.
Gerli Jõgeva
Instructors
Gerli Jõgeva joined Wolfram Research in 2014. She has a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Tartu, Estonia. During her studies, she did research in the bioinformatics group and was a TA in programming and discrete mathematics courses. Her current role at Wolfram is as a technical consultant, which allows her to work on various projects, including building infrastructure and dynamic content for Computer-Based MathTMmaterials. She is also a big fan of good coding standards, functional programming and graphs. Her hobbies and interests include choral music, orienteering, racket sports and reading fantasy novels.
Giorgia Fortuna
Instructors
Giorgia Fortuna completed her PhD in mathematics at MIT in May 2013. She worked on infinite-dimensional Lie algebras and, more generally, in geometric representation theory.
She attended the 2014 Wolfram Summer School and joined Wolfram Research afterward. She now works on the Machine Learning and Deep Learning team. She is implementing functions for unsupervised machine learning, focusing on estimating distributions, fitting data and generating models aiming to describe unlabeled datasets.
She is interested in statistics, probability and pure math.
Giulio Alessandrini
Instructors
Giulio Alessandrini graduated with a master’s degree in physics at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” His studies comprised mainly statistical mechanics and its applications in different fields, such as neural networks, disordered systems and biological systems. His last project revolved around the statistical analysis of bacterium E. coli’s central carbon metabolism. He participated in the 2012 Summer School as a student and joined Wolfram Research afterward. He now contributes to the development of image processing functions for Wolfram Language. His interests span from natural sciences and Karate-Do to Italian cantautori (singer-songwriters), science fiction and politics.
Hector Zenil
Instructors
Hector Zenil joined Wolfram Research as an R&D fellow in 2006. He graduated with a BS in math from the National University of Mexico (UNAM) and with a master’s degree in logic (LoPhiSS) from the Sorbonne. He is a graduate student at Lille 1 and Paris 1 universities in computer science and philosophy of science, both on algorithmic complexity and randomness. He has been an intern at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University and is a senior research associate for the Wolfram|Alpha project.
Hernan Moraldo
Instructors
Hernan Moraldo is a developer in Wolfram|Alpha's Advanced R&D Group (ARG). Within Wolfram|Alpha, he worked on many projects related to parsing and data processing (also including some managing, briefly). Previously, he worked for a number of years in the computer games industry, and was a cofounder and member of the board of the Argentine Game Developers Association (ADVA in Spanish). He taught courses on computer game development and on artificial intelligence for games at Universidad Maimónides, Instituto Image Campus and Escuela Da Vinci.
Hernan is greatly passionate about technology and innovation; he's especially interested in different forms of automation (based on automatic data processing and analysis, language, vision, robotics, etc.). He lived most of his life in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and is now living in Bariloche, Argentina.
Ian Johnson
Instructors
Ian Johnson joined Wolfram Research as an intern after the Wolfram Science Summer School 2014 and was subsequently hired as a junior software engineer in the Software Engineering department. He has worked on integrating Arduino and other device functionality into the Wolfram Language, as well as expanding low-level hardware interfaces on the Raspberry Pi and related devices.
His project for the Summer School 2014 was interfacing an Arduino with Mathematica natively using the Device Framework.
He is currently studying at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, majoring in computer science and electrical engineering. Some of Ian's interests include designing and building electrical circuits, robotics, programming, solving problems, learning about math and physics, coaching his high-school debate team and fixing things.
Jack Heimrath
Instructors
Jack Heimrath is a PhD candidate in pure mathematics at the Wroclaw University of Science and Technology. Before grad school, he read Part III at the University of Cambridge. His areas of interest include analytic number theory, dynamical systems and the interplay between the two. Jack was a student at the 2019 Wolfram Summer School, after which he heavily integrated Wolfram technologies into his teaching. Aside from teaching and learning mathematics, he enjoys reading comic books, bouldering, solving nonograms and studying chess endgames.
Jamie Williams
Instructors
Jamie Williams is a senior computable data architect with the Wolfram|Alpha team. He received a PhD in theoretical low-temperature atomic physics from the University of Colorado in 1999. Before joining the Wolfram team, Jamie was a scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, investigating nonequilibrium dynamics and quantum computing in ultracold atomic systems. He first encountered the ideas in NKS in 2002 while researching a project on entanglement dynamics in quantum cellular automata. He is interested in the deployment of NKS-based approaches for solving real-world problems in physics, as well as the application of NKS methodology in the architecture of computational knowledge systems.
Jan Baetens
Instructors
Jan Baetens graduated as an environmental engineer from Ghent University in 2007, after which he joined that university’s Research Unit Knowledge-Based Systems ( KERMIT ). Having struggled with traditional modeling approaches and their weaknesses while completing his master’s thesis, he finds that cellular automata provide an alternate perspective for solving engineering problems. He attended the NKS Summer School 2008 to expand his knowledge of the topic and was an instructor for the NKS Summer School 2009 and 2010. In the framework of his ongoing PhD research, he addresses the usability of CA for describing biological spatio-temporal processes as well as the stability characteristics of CA. The research has led to several published papers and Wolfram Demonstrations. Currently, he is affiliated with Ghent University, at which he teaches several mathematics courses.
Jason Cawley
Instructors
Jason Cawley first discussed the ideas in A New Kind of Science with Stephen Wolfram in the early 1990s, and read early drafts of the work around that time. In the last few years before publication, Jason worked for Stephen Wolfram as a research assistant on historical and philosophical issues, including many topics covered in the notes. Jason's graduate studies were in political science at the University of Chicago, and his wide-ranging interests include philosophy, social science, economics, finance and the history of thought. After the book was published, Jason created and moderated the NKS Forum, answering reader questions about NKS. Jason then worked for Wolfram Research developing Mathematica's capabilities in the social sciences, including the development of CountryData and FinancialData. He worked on the Wolfram|Alpha project from its inception to its public release, including much of its social science content. For the last five years, Jason has been Director of Architecture at Wolfram Solutions, the consulting arm of Wolfram Research, bringing its technologies and methods to a wide range of corporate and government clients. He lives in Anthem, Arizona.
Presentations
Jérôme Louradour
Instructors
Jesse Galef
Instructors
Jesse Galef is a research scientist who joined the Machine Learning team at Wolfram in 2020. He got his master’s in computer science from Columbia after going through and being a TA for the General Assembly data science program in Boston. Before specializing in machine learning, Jesse worked in the nonprofit sector as a media relations professional promoting effective altruism and the reduction of global catastrophic risks.
Jofre Espigulé Pons
Instructors
Jofre Espigulé Pons has a background in physics. Prior to joining Wolfram, he did research on quantum physics and biophysics, in particular on the magnetoreception of birds and the limits of human vision. He was a student at the Wolfram Summer School 2015, where he used machine learning to identify species of birds based on their songs. He has a broad interest in topics ranging from computational linguistics to computational sports.
John Cassel
Instructors
John Cassel currently works as a Research Programmer with the Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content team, focusing on biology topics. In the past, John has worked on a variety of database infrastructure and data modeling projects at Wolfram|Alpha, Agrible and other startups. John holds a bachelor’s of science in computer science from UIUC and a master’s degree of design in strategic foresight from OCADU, where he worked on multi-stakeholder engagement and modeling processes for the risk governance of emerging technologies. John is excited to engage with students with a diverse range of backgrounds and interests and hopes both the areas of his current work (biological sequence processing, bioinformatics, agroecology, biodiversity, natural resource management, systems biology, etc.) and his previous experiences (data modeling/databases, parametric design, strategic foresight, system dynamics modeling, probabilistic programming, etc.) will be applicable.John Dixon
Instructors
John Dixon received his PhD in the history of American civilization from Harvard University in 2014. His dissertation unveiled the rich human geography of the eighteenth-century Atlantic Ocean through digital mapping and analysis of ships' logbooks. He joined Wolfram Research in 2015 after a stint at HarvardX working on a MOOC emphasizing interdisciplinary inquiry through material culture. As assistant to Stephen Wolfram, he coordinates Wolfram's newest educational efforts in computational thinking, contributes expertise to the development of new and existing educational products and is involved with various special projects in education and the humanities. John also holds a BA in history and a BS in ceramic and materials engineering from Clemson University.
John McNally
Instructors
John McNally joined Wolfram Research in 2022. He received his BS in physics and MEd in curriculum and instruction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Wolfram Research, John taught mathematics and physics for K–12 students, where he strove to make concepts from university courses and research accessible to a wider audience. He has also coached for the Beamline for Schools program in area schools. While teaching, John became interested in computational thinking as an organizing principle for education and as an important future skill for students. Aside from education, he maintains an avid hobbyist’s interest in high-energy physics, cosmology, economics and deep learning.
Jon Lederman
Instructors
Jon Lederman is a physicist with interests in quantum field theory and general relativity. He is particularly interested in the emergence of ordinary quantum mechanics and relativistic quantum mechanics in the Wolfram model. Although the Wolfram model relies on objects with minimal structure, known physics relies on mathematical structures such as continuous manifolds for special and general relativity (spacetime itself) and Hilbert spaces for quantum mechanics. To this end, Jon is focusing his theoretical research on how these fundamental mathematical structures may be defined within the Wolfram model to support the emergence of known physics within the Wolfram model. In particular, he is researching the application of category theory and topological quantum field theory to the Wolfram model building on the fundamental research of Baez and Lurie. Jon is also a tech entrepreneur. He is the founder of Spinor, a tech startup that is developing voice AI technology. He is also building a science educational platform called Physica that is aimed at creating high-caliber educational content in physics, mathematics, computer science and other fields. Prior to Spinor, Jon founded and built the technology platform SonicCloud, a venture-backed and award-winning audio technology company that has commercialized audio enhancement technology. Jon worked on his doctoral research in physics at UCLA and Brookhaven Labs. He also holds two master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford and Columbia. He completed his undergraduate work at Harvard, majoring in music theory and composition. Jon is an avid musician and songwriter.Jonathan Gorard
Instructors
Jonathan Gorard is a research mathematician at the University of Cambridge, where he works on a variety of problems related to the intersection of mathematics, physics and computation; having published his first scientific paper at 17, his published work now covers topics ranging from computational complexity theory, combinatorics and cosmology to general relativity, mathematical logic and the foundations of quantum mechanics to cellular automata, complex systems and quantum computation. Since 2017, he has also worked as a mathematical consultant for Wolfram Research, Inc., leading the development of Wolfram Language’s automated theorem-proving and quantum-computing frameworks and working on various related areas, such as semantic representation of mathematics, symbolic logic, discrete-state quantum mechanics and graph theory. He is also one of the principal researchers on the Wolfram Physics Project, having made several key contributions to the mathematical formalism of the Wolfram model (particularly in regards to the derivations of general relativity and quantum mechanics and its connections to quantum information theory); he has also done extensive algorithms development work for the Physics Project, particularly in relation to multiway evolution, hypergraph isomorphism testing, causal graph computation, causal invariance testing and the application of automated theorem-proving techniques. He attended the Wolfram Summer School as a student in 2017 and has been an instructor since 2018.
José Martín-García
Instructors
José’s background is in theoretical physics, and his PhD thesis studied the fascinating properties of the process of formation of the smallest possible black holes in the framework of classical general relativity. This work required the manipulation of nontrivial tensor equations, which José did with Mathematica, starting what would become two major interests of his since then: the development of computer algebra tools to manipulate large tensor expressions and Wolfram Language. José’s work in relativity evolved toward the study of formulations of Einstein’s equations, looking for appropriate formulations for numerical evolutions of black-hole binary spacetimes. This was of vital importance to the study of the generation of gravitational wave signals in black hole collisions, and he and his collaborators succeeded in identifying a technique that would allow the first stable evolutions of black hole binaries in 2004. With the powerful tensor tools José had developed by then, he also studied high-order perturbations of spacetimes and developed large collections of identities for the Riemann tensor, now frequently used when developing alternative theories of general relativity. In 2010, he started working for Wolfram Research, and since then, he has been fortunate to work on a variety of exciting projects, including geography, the framework for dates and times, the language for units, quantities and their uncertainty, and many other projects. José also regularly participates in discussions on the design of Wolfram Language itself, one of the most interesting parts of working at Wolfram.
Katarina Miljkovic
Instructors
Katarina Miljkovic has written for symphony orchestra, string orchestra and various other groupings, including works for amplified solo instruments and electronics, saxophone quartet, electric guitar and percussion. Ms. Miljkovic has been exploring the relationship of music, science and nature. This initially led her to the Benoit Mandelbrot essay "The Fractal Geometry of Nature". The study resulted in her cycle, " Forest ", for two prepared pianos and percussion, released by Sachimay Records. Currently, Ms. Miljkovic is working on mapping elementary rules from A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram to sound. She presented her exploration in this new field at the NKS international conferences in 2004, 2006, and 2007; NKS Summer School 2004 and 2009 ; the 2005 Wolfram Technology Conference; soundaXis 2006 in Toronto; the 2007 International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music, held in Berlin; and Cambridge Science Festival, 2009 and 2010. Katarina Miljkovic established her carrier as a composer in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia. In 1992, she moved to Boston for doctoral studies in music composition at the New England Conservatory of Music. Currently, Katarina Miljkovic is a full-time faculty member at New England Conservatory of Music, where she has been teaching since 1997.
Kevin Daily
Instructors
Kevin Daily is a team lead in Wolfram Technical Support. He helps customers learn how to use the Wolfram technology stack as a certified instructor and guides the skill development of other technical support engineers. He also assists as a sales engineer, such as onsite at the American Physical Society's March Meeting the last two years, and as a main Wolfram Language contact with JPL's Europa Clipper Pre-Project.
Prior to joining Wolfram, he earned a PhD in physics from Washington State University. He used Mathematica every day to prototype new ideas and better understand the equations of quantum mechanics. His main research background was in hyperspherical descriptions of few-body systems, including ultracold atoms and the quantum Hall effect (the latter as a postdoc at Purdue University).
He has gained teaching experience throughout his higher education. As an undergraduate, he was part of the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington, where he led physics tutorials in introductory physics. As a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher, he taught various physics courses, such as undergraduate labs, and guest-lectured on graduate atomic physics topics.
His interests include LEGO, board games and playing any kind of team sport.
Kiel Howe
Instructors
Kiel obtained his PhD from Stanford University and worked as a Research Associate at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory writing mathematical poetry about subatomic particles. He now makes learning statistical mechanics and quantum computing into a delightful and interactive experience as an assistant professor at Minerva Schools at KGI, and his current research interests involve connections between deep learning, statistical mechanics and quantum information.
Kovas Boguta
Instructors
Kovas Boguta joined the Stephen Wolfram Science Group in 2003. Kovas earned a BA in mathematics from the University of Chicago; however, his NKS education began at a much younger age, playing the Game of Life and Rocky's Boots. At Wolfram Research, Kovas worked on a variety of projects, including NKS-related Mathematica development and NKS outreach/education.
Kyle Keane
Instructors
Kyle Keane is currently a full-time lecturer at MIT and part-time consultant at Wolfram in the Technical Communications and Strategy Group. Kyle was a research programmer in the Special Projects Department of Wolfram Research from 2012–2015, where he worked on establishing K–12 programming initiatives, including developing a general step-by-step physics and equation solver in Wolfram|Alpha and helping Siri speak Wolfram|Alpha results. His main areas of interest are the pedagogical effectiveness of interactive graphics, evidence-based infusion of programming into science education, improving the accessibility of technology for people with disabilities and user experience. Kyle has a PhD from the University of California, Riverside, where his dissertation was on utilizing weak quantum measurements to protect quantum systems from information loss during quantum computing.
Luca Belli
Instructors
Luca received his PhD in math at University of Rome Tor Vergata, after graduating from Sapienza University of Rome with both a bachelor's and master's degree in mathematics.
After taking part in the 2012 Summer School as a student, he joined Wolfram as a math content developer. He again participated in the 2013 Summer School as an instructor.
Recently Luca was involved in the implementation of the back end of the Wolfram Problem Generator and in the analysis of its data.
Mano Namuduri
Instructors
Mano is a programmer in the Special Projects department of Wolfram Research and a Research Fellow with the Wolfram Physics Project. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from Minerva Schools in 2020 and started a master’s in physics at ENS Paris in fall 2021. Having participated in the inaugural Fundamental Physics track of the Wolfram Summer School in 2020, Mano is extremely excited to continue exploring the foundations of physics, simple computational systems and mathematical logic with her mentees at this year’s Summer School.
Marco Thiel
Instructors
Marco is an applied mathematician with training in theoretical physics and dynamical systems, which many people might know because of a subarea called chaos theory. He is full professor at the University of Aberdeen (UK). Apart from some more theoretical work in mathematics, his main area of work is mathematical modeling. He uses mathematical structures and patterns to describe a large variety of systems. Some of the applications he has worked on so far are Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, traffic modeling, studying the stability of our solar system, modeling the life cycle of a biological cell, population dynamics, the synchronisation of heartbeats of mother and foetus, financial and forensic mathematics, voting patterns, movement of newborns, climate modeling, whiskey making, accident reconstruction, and patterns in the mating behavior of fireflies. A lot of his work involves the analysis of data, i.e. informing and testing models with data. In 2017, Marco received the Wolfram Innovator Award; he is also an instructor for the Wolfram Language. He coordinates a data science postgraduate degree program, which is taught using the Wolfram Language, at the University of Aberdeen.
Maria Sargsyan
Instructors
Maria Sargsyan, a research scientist consultant at Wolfram Research since 2018, obtained her computer science degree from the American University of Armenia and is doing her master’s studies in mathematics and computer science at Saarland University. Maria is a part of the Machine Learning group, focusing on the utilization and deployment of neural networks within Wolfram Language. She has significantly enriched the Wolfram Neural Net Repository with pre-trained models and illustrative example notebooks. Key projects include retraining ImageIdentify, integrating Natural OCR within TextRecognize and facilitating the integration with other deep learning frameworks through ONNX support.
Mark Boyer
Instructors
Mark Boyer worked as a full-time applications programmer at Wolfram from 2016–2017, but he is currently studying at the University of Washington as a graduate student.
Markus van Almsick
Instructors
Markus van Almsick has used Mathematica since the very beginning in 1987. His areas of research and interest are quantum physics, loop quantum gravity, group theory, image processing and machine learning. While at the University of Illinois from 1988 to 1992, Markus started to work for Wolfram Research, Inc. as a consultant. Thereafter, during his time in academia, he worked for the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany, and as a faculty member in the Biomedical Image Analysis group at the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. He was the first to provide Mathematica training in Europe, and has taught Wolfram Language in dedicated lectures at the Eindhoven University of Technology. In industry, Markus has been involved in several Mathematica-related projects ranging from finance (Deutsche Bundesbank) and business modeling (ExxonMobil) to kid slide design (Kaiser & Kühne). As a member of the IMS steering committee, Markus has helped to organize the International Mathematica Symposium in Maastricht, the Netherlands; Beijing, China; London, the United Kingdom; and Prague, the Czech Republic. Since 2009, Markus has contributed to the code base of Mathematica, with a focus on image and signal processing.
Matteo Salvarezza
Instructors
Matteo Salvarezza joined Wolfram Research in 2016 after attending the Wolfram Summer School. Shortly before that, he earned a PhD in theoretical particle physics (performing research on electroweak physics beyond the Standard Model) at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” Italy. At Wolfram Research, he is part of the machine learning group and works on developing tools and applications for the Wolfram Language, with a particular focus on neural networks. His most important personal interest is, by far, music—he has been playing guitar, keenly listening and composing music for the last 14 years.
Matthew Frank
Instructors
Matthew Frank joined Stephen Wolfram's science group during the creation of A New Kind of Science and assisted with subjects from time to Timaeus and from sets to sestina. In July 2004 he defended his PhD on "Axioms and Aesthetics in Constructive Mathematics and Differential Geometry" (at the University of Chicago), and he is currently beginning a job on Wall Street with Goldman Sachs. He enjoys the camaraderie of scientific work after midnight.
Presentations
Matthew Szudzik
Instructors
Matthew Szudzik made significant contributions to A New Kind of Science from 1998 through 2000 and during the summer of 2001 as a research assistant to Stephen Wolfram. His work focused primarily on the analysis of simple programs and on the theoretical foundations of computational mathematics. He holds a PhD in mathematical logic from Carnegie Mellon University. Matthew Szudzik has also worked as a special lecturer and as an assistant teaching professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon’s campuses in Pennsylvania and Qatar.
Max Piskunov
Instructors
Max Piskunov is a researcher and a software engineer in the Wolfram Physics Project. He has been in the project since the beginning. He is the primary developer of SetReplace, the package used to run Wolfram models, which he started developing at the beginning of 2019. Max attended the Wolfram Summer School as a student in 2014, 2015 and 2019 (each time under a different name) and is joining this year for the first time as an instructor. He got his MS in physics from Moscow State University. He started a physics PhD at Northeastern University but quit to pursue the Wolfram Physics Project. He also did an internship at Lyft’s self-driving division, where he worked on camera-to-LiDAR calibration. Max is a vegan and is involved in the animal rights movement. In his free time, he goes hiking, dabbles in flying photography drones and composes music.
Michael Schreiber
Instructors
Michael Schreiber received his PhD from Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) for his dissertation on support systems for university development. He has consulted for various organizations and taught marketing at WU. Throughout his career he has made many and various contributions to art events and systems conferences in Europe. For the last several years he has engaged in NKS research using Mathematica. He has authored more than 350 Demonstrations.
Nikolay Murzin
Instructors
Nikolay was always into computer science, programming and hacking, but he was curious and graduated with a specialist’s degree in physics from Moscow State University. Then after trying himself as a web developer for a bit, he got into IBM as a research software engineer and data scientist, working with statistical models, computer vision and natural language processing in mostly retail and supply-chain related projects. He enjoys reading books and papers on the subjects of machine learning, math and physics and also listens to a lot of science and science fiction audiobooks. Nikolay likes to take part in competitions and hackathons, quickly dives into new technologies and continuously learns new things.
Øyvind Tafjord
Instructors
Øyvind Tafjord has been working on various aspects of A New Kind of Science since 2001, touching on a wide range of topics from details of theoretical physics to technical book-production issues. He is also interested in the general development of Mathematica. His educational background consists of a degree in physics from the Norwegian Institute of Technology (1994) and a PhD from Princeton University (1999), working on string theory as a possible framework for a unified theory of gravitation and quantum mechanics. He also spent two years as a postdoc at McGill University before coming to Wolfram Research.
Presentations
Paul Abbott
Instructors
Paul Abbott is an adjunct professor at the University of Western Australia. He obtained his PhD in theoretical atomic physics from UWA in 1987, worked for Wolfram Research from 1989–1992 and has been a Wolfram consultant and instructor since 1997. Paul was the founding technical editor of The Mathematical Journal in 1990 and was a columnist until 2010. His interests range from computational physics, applied mathematics and special functions to courseware design. All of his research and teaching since 1985 has used Wolfram technologies in some way, and his work has been recognized most recently by a Wolfram Innovator Award in 2015 and an Australian University Teaching Award in 2016. In his spare time, Paul enjoys cycling, walking, swimming, photography, reading and writing.
Paul-Jean Letourneau
Instructors
Paul-Jean Letourneau attended the NKS Summer School 2004, where he completed a pure NKS project on elementary cellular automata with memory. He has been an instructor at the Summer School since 2005. His 2004 project developed into his master's thesis in theoretical physics, "Statistical Mechanics of Cellular Automata with Memory." He has worked in several industrial and academic laboratories around North America, where he made original contributions to real-world problems in medical imaging, geophysical seismic imaging, protein structure prediction and DNA-protein interactions. Paul-Jean is now lead developer of computational biology for Wolfram|Alpha.
Presentations
Peter Barendse
Instructors
Peter Barendse was born and grew up in the United States, attended the University of Vermont, and received his PhD in mathematics from Boston University in 2010.
The topic of his doctoral dissertation was combinatorial large cardinal hypotheses. He has published articles online and in the Journal of the Mathematical Society of Japan.
His scholarly interests are in mathematical logic, dynamical systems, theoretical computer science, physics, philosophy and economics. He is one of the first to study the theoretical capabilities of nonlocal cellular automata and model paradoxes with cellular automata. He now manages mathematical content for Wolfram|Alpha.
Besides these, he enjoys teaching, playing sports (especially water sports), debating, watching and making movies and traveling.
Philip Maymin
Instructors
Philip Maymin is a professor of analytics and the director of the master of science in business analytics program at the Fairfield University Dolan School of Business. He is the founding managing editor of Algorithmic Finance and the cofounder and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Sports Analytics. He is the chief technology officer for the Esports Development League (ESDL), an insight partner with Essentia Analytics, an advisor to Athletes Unlimited, and an affiliated of the Langer Mindfulness Institute and has been an analytics consultant with several NBA teams. He holds a PhD in finance from the University of Chicago, a master’s in applied mathematics from Harvard University and a bachelor’s in computer science from Harvard University. He also holds a JD and is an attorney-at-law admitted to practice in California. He has been a portfolio manager at Long-Term Capital Management, Ellington Management Group and his own hedge fund, Maymin Capital Management. He was a finalist for the 2010 Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism. He was awarded a Wolfram Innovator Award in 2015. He won the Wolfram Livecoding Challenge in 2016 and second place in 2018, and he won the Wolfram One-Liner Competition in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019. He is the only person to have won both the grand prize for best research paper (2018) and hackathon (2020) at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. He attended the 2007 Wolfram Summer School as a student, the 2019 Wolfram High School Summer Camp as an instructor and the Wolfram Technology Conference as a presenter in 2016, 2018 and 2019.
Riccardo Di Virgilio
Instructors
Riccardo Di Virgilio received a bachelor’s degree in economics and financial science in November 2005 and another bachelor’s in moral and social philosophy in December 2007. From then on, he has worked as a web developer for Sprint24.com, developing a Python web application to centralize business management. Every employee now uses a barcode system to update in real time the status of an order, and the application automatically dispatches notifications (via email, SMS or fax) and creates related documentation (e.g. invoices, delivery documents, etc.). He succeeded in transforming a heavily paper-based production workflow into a dynamic, database-driven workflow, resulting in increased efficiency, reduced waste and a consistent decrease of labor and human errors.
Richard Phillips
Instructors
Richard Phillips was a student at the first NKS Summer School in 2003. He joined Wolfram Research after that, and since then he has worked on NKS- and Mathematica-related projects. During his formal education he received a BA in physics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge and an MSc in computer science at Bristol University building a system for Mobile Software.
Presentations
Robert Nachbar
Instructors
Robert Nachbar is senior project director in Wolfram Solutions, the consulting arm of Wolfram Research, where he both leads technical teams and develops custom applications for clients with Wolfram technologies. He joined Solutions in 2014 after retiring from the pharmaceutical industry, where he used Mathematica and other Wolfram technologies for drug design, data analysis and clinical research. He holds a PhD in organic chemistry from Brown University and received the Wolfram Innovator Award in 2012. His research and computational interests include chemistry, biology, discrete mathematics, optimization, simulation and interactive visualization. He has been a frequent presenter at Wolfram Technology Conferences.
Sebastian Bodenstein
Instructors
Sebastian Bodenstein received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Cape Town for work on precision quark mass determinations and an analysis of the current discrepancy between experiment and theory of the muon magnetic anomaly. Currently, he is a developer for the Machine Learning Group at Wolfram Research, with a particular interest in neural networks. His other interests include making music, playing soccer and cooking indian food.
Seth J. Chandler
Instructors
Seth J. Chandler is a professor of law and vice dean at the University of Houston Law Center, where he also serves as co-director of its nationally ranked Health Law & Policy Institute. He is a longtime Mathematica enthusiast and has presented at numerous Mathematica conferences and has used the program extensively in his scholarship on the economics of insurance, law and economics, social networks and, most recently, the network structure of law. He currently teaches a diverse set of courses, including insurance law, health law and contract law, as well as an introductory course in analytic methods for lawyers. His educational background includes an AB from Princeton University (1979) and a JD from Harvard Law School (1983). He is self-taught in Mathematica and NKS. He is married to an immigration lawyer and has three children, ranging from age 4 to 17.
Presentations
Shivam Sawarn
Instructors
Shivam is currently a consultant on the Special Projects team at Wolfram Research. He has a bachelor’s degree in physics and is pursuing a master’s degree in the same from Delhi University (India). He has a wide range of interests including quantum computing and particle physics. He is also a Qiskit developer and has worked on some open source projects. He attended the Wolfram India School 2022 before becoming a TA for the Wolfram Summer School Science & Technology track.
Silvia Hao
Instructors
Silvia has been an independent consultant in the Technical Communications and Strategy Group at Wolfram Research since 2015. She is also founder and CEO of a Shenzhen-based cloud solution company (Glimscape). Silvia chose her name because of a college-time crush on the works of Sylvia Plath. She is a big fan of Ray Bradbury and Ursula Le Guin. She worked at a state institute and at different companies, tried freelance, has now decided to run her own company. She considers herself an encyclopédiste wannabe. During her free time, she likes to explore random interesting questions using mathematical modeling. Mathematica is among the most powerful tools in her toolbox. Silvia got her bachelor’s degree in theoretical physics from USTC and her master’s degree in applied physics from CAEP. Despite long-time training in modern science, she still secretly believe in fairy tales.
Siria Sadeddin
Instructors
Siria is a physicist who has found her passion in data science. After completing her bachelor’s degree in 2018, she has been a full-time autodidact data science student; she is especially interested in deep learning and its computer vision applications. A year ago, she joined the Wolfram team as a consultant, and recently, she also joined the Wolfram machine learning team, where she has been working on deep learning architecture development. Siria enjoys outdoor activities such as hiking or going to the beach, and she also likes painting with watercolors. In the near future, she wants to join a master’s program or maybe study applied math.
Sotiris Michos
Instructors
Sotiris Michos received his diploma and PhD from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH). During his PhD studies, he was part of the Wireless Communications & Information Processing (WCIP) Group at AUTH and worked in the broader areas of big data and network science, with a special emphasis on their information theoretic aspects. His research interests span a range of subject areas, including computer science, information theory, complexity, machine learning, telecommunications and control theory, with a focus on their relationships to pure mathematics. He is especially interested in the area of cognitive sciences and, in particular, in the study of complex systems in nature and technology. He has also been involved with matters of academically gifted education, contributing to the works of Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth Greece and having the honor and joy of interacting with many bright students through an assortment of different courses.
Stephen Schroeder
Instructors
Stephen earned a bachelor’s degree in geology in 2019, specializing in geostatistics and reactive transport geochemistry. He attended the Wolfram Summer School in 2019 and joined Wolfram Research that year as a developer. Today, he works on Wolfram’s Deployed Products and Services team, primarily developing tools for educators. In his free time, Stephen enjoys listening to podcasts and cooking and is a dedicated distance runner and rock climber.
Timothée Verdier
Instructors
Timothée Verdier graduated from the École Polytechnique and then obtained a PhD in biophysics at ENS Lyon, where he studied the physics of virus self-assembly and super-resolution imaging. Currently, he is a developer for the machine learning group at Wolfram Research, where he works on developing machine learning functionalities for the Wolfram Language, with a particular interest in neural networks and natural language processing. He is an outdoor and mountain-stuff lover who goes hiking, climbing or ski-touring whenever he has the opportunity…
Tobías Canavesi
Instructors
Tobías Canavesi is in love with mathematics, the universe and artificial intelligence. After finishing his degree in astronomy, he has become a PhD student in theoretical physics with a scholarship granted by the Argentine National Council of Scientific and Technical Research. He enjoys working with people from different areas because he believes that multidisciplinary research is vital for the advancement of society. Some of his hobbies are playing and collecting retro games, programming, reading and imagining about the future.
Tommaso Bolognesi
Instructors
Tommaso Bolognesi has a laurea in physics from Università degli studi di Pavia and an MS in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has worked at the Italian National Research Council (CNR) since 1977 on computer music and design of concurrent systems. He has published a number of papers, participated in several national and European projects, helped run international conferences and workshops and contributed to the definition of the ISO-standard LOTOS language. As a 2005 NKS Summer School student he researched process algebra and Petri nets. Most of his efforts are now on NKS-related topics, in particular on discrete models of space and spacetime based on graph rewriting ( A New Kind of Science, Chapter 9 ).
Tuseeta Banerjee
Instructors
Tuseeta Banerjee is a Research Scientist in the Machine Learning team, focusing on applications of neural networks. She imports and implements neural net models in the Wolfram Language for various high-level functions in Mathematica and for the Wolfram Neural Net Repository. In her previous role as a technology engineer, she provided machine-learning based solutions to clients. She is also a certified Wolfram language instructor, teaching and creating various courses on Mathematica programming with a focus on statistics and deep learning. Prior to joining Wolfram, she completed her Ph.D. in 2015 from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign with her research work in the field of chemical physics and certification in Computational Science and Engineering. For her Ph.D. research, she used Monte Carlo-based quantum-classical path integral methods to study models that mimic chemical reactions and photosynthetic reaction centers.Vitaliy Kaurov
Instructors
Vitaliy Kaurov joined the Technical Communications and Strategy Group at Wolfram Research in 2010. He has given numerous talks at universities, research labs, companies and conferences around the world, educating people on how Wolfram technologies empower academics and industries, governments and individuals. Vitaliy is involved with international business development, oversees Wolfram Community, writes for the Wolfram Blog, is a faculty member at the Wolfram Summer School and helps with many other Wolfram initiatives. Vitaliy received his PhD in theoretical physics from the City University of New York in the area of ultra-cold quantum gases, and also worked in the fields of complex systems and nonlinear dynamics. He collaborated in National Science Foundation–sponsored research, was a professor at the College of Staten Island and served as an organizer and chair at American Physical Society conferences. Wolfram technologies helped Vitaliy to discover novel scientific ideas and develop innovative educational solutions.
Vladimir Grankovsky
Instructors
Vladimir Grankovsky has worked with broad topics including computer science, electronics design and neuroscience. He is interested in transhumanism, brain-like artificial intelligence and cosmology. He participated in the Wolfram Summer School in 2013 and has been using the Wolfram Language since his first year of university.
Wenzhen Zhu
Instructors
Wenzhen is a data scientist and software engineer at AWS, specifically in the Machine Learning Solutions Lab. As a customer-facing data scientist, her job is to design, develop and evaluate innovative machine learning and deep learning models to solve diverse challenges and opportunities across industries. She interacts with customers directly to understand their business problems and helps them with defining and implementing scalable machine learning and deep learning solutions to derive business value quickly. Before that, she graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, where she got a BS and MS in computer science and math. She likes machine learning because it is a powerful tool and subject that combines math and programming. She is also broadly interested in many machine learning and AI topics, computer graphics and financial investments. Outside of work, she loves traveling (business and personal), reading (emotional novels and research papers), watching movies (romance and sci-fi), shopping (tech gadgets, fashion and beauty products) and exercising. Dance is her favorite way of exercising, and she takes Latin dance and ballet classes regularly. She also plays the guzheng—an ancient Chinese string instrument. She is an INFJ, a very complicated personality. She is also an excellent cook, and she likes to cook authentic Szechuan dishes to host her friends on weekends.
Xavier Roy
Instructors
Xavier Roy holds a PhD in theoretical cosmology. During his academic research, he developed several mathematical models, algorithms and numerical simulations to describe and study perturbations in cosmology and the evolution of the universe. He focused in particular on problems related to dark matter and dark energy.
He joined Wolfram Research in January 2015, where he has worked since as a consultant in the Algorithms R&D department.
Yi Yin
Instructors
Yi is a leading advocate for AI literacy. Her unique background in social sciences and data journalism distinguishes her as an early adopter of GPT models for educational purposes, especially in guiding college students in narrative writing. As the Academic Innovation Programs Manager at Wolfram, Yi spearheads advocacy programs that integrate AI with career development, thus empowering a new generation of tech-savvy professionals. Holding a Master’s degree in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University and possessing over six years of experience in education consulting, she offers invaluable guidance to students navigating the competitive realm of graduate school applications in her spare time.
Yorick Zeschke
Instructors
Yorick is currently a student in Berlin planning to study liberal arts and sciences in the Netherlands. Most of the time, he does research on or learns about computer science, maths, physics, philosphy and NKS. His main projects at the moment include studying multiway systems for the Wolfram Physics Project and participating in the German Informatics Olympiad. Apart from working on those projects, he plays the accordion and piano and sings classically. Another passion of his is reading classical literature and writing short stories and poems.Teaching Assistants
Abigail Devereaux
Teaching Assistants
Abigail Devereaux joined Wolfram Research in 2007. She has a bachelor's degree in physics (2004) and a master's degree in mathematics (2007) from Boston University and is currently a Mercatus PhD Fellow in economics at George Mason University. She was involved in the Wolfram Science Summer School from 2008–2015 as event director, as a participant in 2008 and 2010, as a teaching assistant in 2011 and as an instructor from 2012–2015. Her presentation on cellular automata over graph topologies at the 2008 Midwest NKS Conference was later written into an article and published in Complex Systems . In her spare time she sings operatic soprano and writes speculative fiction.
Amir Sadeghi
Teaching Assistants
Amir Sadeghi is a physics PhD candidate researching chromosome organization in bacteria. He has been familiar with Mathematica since 2008 but started broadly using it in his research and teaching in 2018. Additionally, Amir actively studies educational and academic aspects of integrating computational thinking and tools into teaching curricula and scientific publishing. He attended the 2021 Wolfram Summer School as a student in the Educational Innovation track and worked on curriculum mapping. Amir is a TA for the Educational Innovation track for the 2022 Wolfram Summer School.
Cameron Beetar
Teaching Assistants
Cameron is a mathematical physics MS student at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He graduated with his BS in physics, mathematics and computer science at the beginning of 2020 and completed his Physics Honours at the end of 2020. He has a passion for learning and is more than happy to discuss any interesting ideas someone might have. He is currently using neural networks to probe phase transitions for some interesting quantum many-body problems and how these transitions are affected by changing the topologies of the systems. With regards to the Wolfram Physics Project (WPP), he is studying the Einstein equations from a sort of hydrodynamic perspective. Using the WPP formalism, he hopes to be able to derive higher-order corrections to Einstein’s equations. This could have incredibly interesting implications for the way we understand our universe near black holes (or near any significantly strong gravitational field). He has a growing interest in discrete differential geometry (which can also partly be attributed to his work with the WPP). Outside of physics, Cameron is a keen rock climber and a lover of mountains—he has even been to the Himalayas and summited two +6000m peaks! He also loves art and poetry (although in a more casual way than he does physics).
Carlos Muñoz
Teaching Assistants
Carlos Muñoz started working as a Consultant for Wolfram|Alpha in September 2019 and attended the Wolfram Summer School twice (in 2016 and 2019). His interest in systems biology led him to learn to program in the Wolfram Language, and he is currently finishing his undergraduate biology thesis on genetic regulatory networks. Besides work and his thesis, Carlos enjoys doing small science projects, making jewelry, playing video games and taking care of his pet ant colonies.Christopher Wolfram
Teaching Assistants
Christopher Wolfram is a full-stack programmer and algorithm developer who has been programming in Wolfram Language since a young age. He has been the lead developer for several built-in Wolfram Language functions (including Nearest and Encrypt), as well as for Tweet-a-Program and several of his own apps. He has presented at SXSW, Maker Faire, livecoding.tv and other venues on topics such as machine learning, data science and IoT programming. Christopher enjoys 3D modeling, Haskell, Swift, history, tennis and traveling. He has been a mentor for the Wolfram Summer Programs for five years.Daavid Väänänen
Teaching Assistants
Daavid Väänänen has a passion for advancing humanity by improving accessibility to high-quality education and applying emerging technologies to enhance organizational excellence and life quality for all. Since attending the Wolfram Summer School in 2017, he has been advocating and developing Wolfram Language–based resources as a Wolfram Community Ambassador, particularly with the Wolfram Foundation’s Computational Thinking Initiatives. He holds a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. As a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University, he continued research on nonlinear dynamics of many-body quantum systems applied to astrophysical environments, as well as promoted educational outreach and public engagement. He also holds a group fitness instructor certificate and enjoys yoga, rock climbing, gardening and other outdoor activities. He firmly believes that by acting together, our persistent efforts will be able to transfer our optimistic ideas into positive realities for all people.
Daniel Sanchez
Teaching Assistants
Daniel Sanchez joined Wolfram Research as a developer for Wolfram|Alpha in June 2017. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from PUCP (Lima, Peru) in 2018. However, his interests now lie in the foundations of computation and the implementation and design of programming languages. These will be his research topics when he starts an MS in computer science. His hobbies—when he is not in front of a computer—are playing Super Smash Bros. Melee, studying Japanese and playing with his 15-year-old dog, Archie.
David Chester
Teaching Assistants
David Chester is a theoretical physicist working at Quantum Gravity Research. His undergraduate studies at MIT focused on quantum field theory and his graduate studies at UCLA investigated gravitational radiation from Feynman diagrams of Yang–Mills theory. David is interested in beyond-the-standard-model physics, elastic formulations of gauge gravity, quasicrystals, theories beyond M-theory, division algebras and thermodynamics. He recently coauthored a work published on the emergence of an 11-dimensional supermembrane from D=27+3. David initiated work toward discrete metric-affine gravity on graphs as a precursor to elastic hypergraphs during the 2021 Wolfram Summer School.Erin Craig
Teaching Assistants
Erin Craig graduated from New College of Florida with a BA in mathematics. Inspired by the beauty of both algebra and automata, she spent her final year of college at University of California, Berkeley exploring an extension of rule 90 to cellular automata over non-Abelian groups. Erin attended the NKS Summer School in 2009, where she explored reducibility of string substitution systems. She joined Wolfram Research as a software developer in 2009.
Fez Zaman
Teaching Assistants
Fez works full time as a lexical programmer at Wolfram|Alpha. He has a BS in cognitive science from SUNY Oswego, where he also minored in computer science and audio production and design. His work centers around music, programming, the computational arts and the philosophy of mind. He attended the Wolfram Summer School in 2016 and 2018, and after joining Wolfram|Alpha, he mentored at the Wolfram High School Summer Camp in 2019 and 2020.Jason Cawley
Teaching Assistants
Jason Cawley first discussed the ideas in A New Kind of Science with Stephen Wolfram in the early 1990s, and read early drafts of the work around that time. In the last few years before publication, Jason worked for Stephen Wolfram as a research assistant on historical and philosophical issues, including many topics covered in the notes. Jason's graduate studies were in political science at the University of Chicago, and his wide-ranging interests include philosophy, social science, economics, finance and the history of thought. After the book was published, Jason created and moderated the NKS Forum, answering reader questions about NKS. Jason then worked for Wolfram Research developing Mathematica's capabilities in the social sciences, including the development of CountryData and FinancialData. He worked on the Wolfram|Alpha project from its inception to its public release, including much of its social science content. For the last five years, Jason has been Director of Architecture at Wolfram Solutions, the consulting arm of Wolfram Research, bringing its technologies and methods to a wide range of corporate and government clients. He lives in Anthem, Arizona.
Presentations
Jean Du Plessis
Teaching Assistants
Jean is a theoretical physics student at Stellenbosch University. He has a special interest in mathematical physics, especially general relativity. He participated in the Wolfram Physics Winter School, where he got involved with the relativity side of the Wolfram Physics Project. He now loves being a junior research affiliate for the Wolfram Physics Project. His wider interests include economics, chess and math. He also loves a good discussion about interesting topics.Jon Lederman
Teaching Assistants
Jon Lederman is a physicist with interests in quantum field theory and general relativity. He is particularly interested in the emergence of ordinary quantum mechanics and relativistic quantum mechanics in the Wolfram model. Although the Wolfram model relies on objects with minimal structure, known physics relies on mathematical structures such as continuous manifolds for special and general relativity (spacetime itself) and Hilbert spaces for quantum mechanics. To this end, Jon is focusing his theoretical research on how these fundamental mathematical structures may be defined within the Wolfram model to support the emergence of known physics within the Wolfram model. In particular, he is researching the application of category theory and topological quantum field theory to the Wolfram model building on the fundamental research of Baez and Lurie. Jon is also a tech entrepreneur. He is the founder of Spinor, a tech startup that is developing voice AI technology. He is also building a science educational platform called Physica that is aimed at creating high-caliber educational content in physics, mathematics, computer science and other fields. Prior to Spinor, Jon founded and built the technology platform SonicCloud, a venture-backed and award-winning audio technology company that has commercialized audio enhancement technology. Jon worked on his doctoral research in physics at UCLA and Brookhaven Labs. He also holds two master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford and Columbia. He completed his undergraduate work at Harvard, majoring in music theory and composition. Jon is an avid musician and songwriter.
Joshua F. Pedro
Teaching Assistants
Joshua is a research scientist and lecturer at the City University of New York whose work involves teaching mathematics and conducting research in applied fields, such as epidemiology, economics and neuroscience. He was a student at the Wolfram Summer School in 2019 and his interests are in machine learning and probabilistic modeling.
József Konczer
Teaching Assistants
József obtained a master of science in theoretical physics at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. After that, he worked as an assistant research fellow at the Wigner Research Centre for Physics. He started his PhD at Eötvös Loránd University. He is a mentor and module leader at Milestone Institute Budapest. His main research topics are string theory, probability theory and discrete dynamical systems. His hobbies are waveboarding, diving and trying out new things.
Julián Laverde
Teaching Assistants
Julián is a physics engineer from the National University of Colombia (2020) and a photonics master’s student. He focuses on modeling optical phenomena and nonlinear integrated photonics. Julián joined Wolfram in October 2020 as a consultant for the Special Projects team after assisting the Wolfram Summer School 2020. He enjoys cooking while listening to history podcasts and playing with his two cats.Mano Namuduri
Teaching Assistants
Mano is a programmer in the Special Projects department of Wolfram Research and a Research Fellow with the Wolfram Physics Project. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from Minerva Schools in 2020 and started a master’s in physics at ENS Paris in fall 2021. Having participated in the inaugural Fundamental Physics track of the Wolfram Summer School in 2020, Mano is extremely excited to continue exploring the foundations of physics, simple computational systems and mathematical logic with her mentees at this year’s Summer School.
Mark Greenberg
Teaching Assistants
Mark Greenberg retired after 20 years teaching high-school math and English in Arizona. His programming skills and passion for integrating computer technology into education have led to leadership positions and conference presentations, including a talk at the 2017 Wolfram Technology Conference. He specializes in creating educational games such as Chicken Scratch, which students have enjoyed in the Wolfram Summer Programs since 2018. Mark was a Wolfram Summer School student in 2019. Between part-time tutoring and teaching, he enjoys spending time with his family, making fractal art and, of course, programming in the Wolfram Language.
Meghan Rieu-Werden
Teaching Assistants
Meghan Rieu-Werden joined Wolfram Research in 2017 as a data manager for the Advanced Research Group. She earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Bridgewater State University and a graduate certificate in database management and business intelligence from Boston University. She has been working in research since 2006 on various topics such as postgraduate medical education, preventive medicine and machine learning. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, gardening, crossword puzzles and crochet.
Michael Reed
Teaching Assistants
Michael Reed is a mathematics researcher with a specialization in designing algebraic-type language for computation, including numerical differential geometric algebra and a dimensional group unified unit system. He has a wide range of interests from number theory to aerospace engineering and the foundations of mathematical physics. He has released several mathematics open source projects on GitHub and is now working with José Martín-García at Wolfram Research in the Algorithms R&D department. He’s come to the Wolfram Summer School because the Wolfram Physics Project is of scientific interest in regards to the foundations of discrete differential geometry.
Michael Sollami
Teaching Assistants
Michael Sollami spends much of his time studying the intersection of pure math and computational systems. After graduating from Trinity College in 2006 with a BS in computer science, Michael headed the quantitative department at the global hedge fund Warisan Capital. Michael eventually returned to academics, and he graduated in 2009 with an MS in pure mathematics. Following a research programming job at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Michael enrolled as a doctoral candidate in the mathematics department at the University of Wyoming. He is currently working toward a PhD in computational discrete mathematics. In 2010, he interned at Wolfram Research as a research associate for the Wolfram|Alpha project and also participated in the NKS Summer School in Burlington, Vermont. Since that most inspirational year, he has continued NKS-driven research in graph theory, algebraic combinatoric and theoretical computer science. Aside from coding and proofs, Michael enjoys dabbling in piano composition, graphic design and poetry.
Robert Mendelsohn
Teaching Assistants
Robert Mendelsohn joined Wolfram Research in 2019 and was a participant in the Wolfram Summer School in 2014. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Texas in 2019. He has worked for Heartland Payment Systems, Nokia and several defense contractors in areas related to cryptography and cybersecurity.Robert Nachbar
Teaching Assistants
Robert Nachbar is senior project director in Wolfram Solutions, the consulting arm of Wolfram Research, where he both leads technical teams and develops custom applications for clients with Wolfram technologies. He joined Solutions in 2014 after retiring from the pharmaceutical industry, where he used Mathematica and other Wolfram technologies for drug design, data analysis and clinical research. He holds a PhD in organic chemistry from Brown University and received the Wolfram Innovator Award in 2012. His research and computational interests include chemistry, biology, discrete mathematics, optimization, simulation and interactive visualization. He has been a frequent presenter at Wolfram Technology Conferences.
Sam Whittington
Teaching Assistants
Sam Whittington is a mathematician and theoretical physicist working toward a PhD that focuses on Lorentzian Kac–Moody algebras and their uses in quantum fields and string theory. In previous research at Imperial College London, his work focused on computational simulations and searches for emergent spacetime in theories of quantum gravity. In addition to theoretical and computational physics, Sam has a keen interest in cyber security, computer science and software development and has worked on several machine-learning models and web apps. He is currently working on a project to help researchers find research relevant to their own, especially in areas of literature they may not be so familiar in.Shivam Sawarn
Teaching Assistants
Shivam is currently a consultant on the Special Projects team at Wolfram Research. He has a bachelor’s degree in physics and is pursuing a master’s degree in the same from Delhi University (India). He has a wide range of interests including quantum computing and particle physics. He is also a Qiskit developer and has worked on some open source projects. He attended the Wolfram India School 2022 before becoming a TA for the Wolfram Summer School Science & Technology track.Silvia Hao
Teaching Assistants
Silvia has been an independent consultant in the Technical Communications and Strategy Group at Wolfram Research since 2015. She is also founder and CEO of a Shenzhen-based cloud solution company (Glimscape). Silvia chose her name because of a college-time crush on the works of Sylvia Plath. She is a big fan of Ray Bradbury and Ursula Le Guin. She worked at a state institute and at different companies, tried freelance, has now decided to run her own company. She considers herself an encyclopédiste wannabe. During her free time, she likes to explore random interesting questions using mathematical modeling. Mathematica is among the most powerful tools in her toolbox. Silvia got her bachelor’s degree in theoretical physics from USTC and her master’s degree in applied physics from CAEP. Despite long-time training in modern science, she still secretly believe in fairy tales.Siria Sadeddin
Teaching Assistants
Siria is a physicist who has found her passion in data science. After completing her bachelor’s degree in 2018, she has been a full-time autodidact data science student; she is especially interested in deep learning and its computer vision applications. A year ago, she joined the Wolfram team as a consultant, and recently, she also joined the Wolfram machine learning team, where she has been working on deep learning architecture development. Siria enjoys outdoor activities such as hiking or going to the beach, and she also likes painting with watercolors. In the near future, she wants to join a master’s program or maybe study applied math.
Swastik Banerjee
Teaching Assistants
Swastik earned a bachelor’s degree in information technology from SRMIST (Chennai, India) in 2021. Swastik’s interests lie in the broad topic of theoretical computer science, particularly algorithms and applied cryptography. He is keen on developing solutions for challenging real–world problems using techniques from theoretical computer science. When not in front of a computer, he can be seen playing the guitar or sitar, composing a song, playing PS4 or talking about crypto and the stock market. Swastik also currently works as a GRM Intern in collaboration with IBM Research India on differential privacy and multi-party computation.
Teja Vodlak
Teaching Assistants
Teja Vodlak is a PhD student at Swansea University, United Kingdom, and a Marie Curie fellow on the Prototouch ITN project, with a background in applied mathematics.
Currently, her research interests focus mostly on computer modeling of human touch, namely the modeling of tactile content by employing multi-scale, multi-physics simulations in order to bridge the gap between mechanical stimulation and spike generation for the virtual prototyping and optimization of tactile displays.
She is an alum of the 2015 Wolfram Summer School.
Tom Lee
Teaching Assistants
Tom studied physics at POSTECH (Korea) and Bonn University (Germany) and graduated in the summer of 2020. He handed in his diploma thesis “Pion Squared Charge Radius Calculation in Lattice QCD with Wilson Twisted Mass Quarks” and is now looking for new career paths. He is interested in theoretical particle physics/lattice QCD and in applying NKS to phenomenological consequences of the models for elementary particles with the local-sub hypergraph. He also likes painting, reading science fiction novels and watching movies.
Valentina Biagini
Teaching Assistants
Valentina Biagini is a data science consultant who provides support in the whole analytic process, from business understanding to data understanding, developing descriptive and predictive analytics projects. She enjoys tackling all kinds of problems and finds new challenges exciting. She obtained a master's degree in theoretical physics at the University of Rome "La Sapienza," in her hometown. For her thesis, "Inference of Local Topology of Wikipedia from Visits Time Series," she used inference methods based on stationarity approximations, programmed in the Wolfram Language. During her studies, she developed a great interest in statistical mechanics, stochastic processes, graph theory, networks and complex systems. She studied and worked on developing algorithms on graphs to extract meaningful information from real systems. In July 2013, she attended the Wolfram Summer School as a student. Since then, Mathematica has been her tool of choice. She loves traveling, analog photography and wandering in foreign cities.
Wenzhen Zhu
Teaching Assistants
Wenzhen is a data scientist and software engineer at AWS, specifically in the Machine Learning Solutions Lab. As a customer-facing data scientist, her job is to design, develop and evaluate innovative machine learning and deep learning models to solve diverse challenges and opportunities across industries. She interacts with customers directly to understand their business problems and helps them with defining and implementing scalable machine learning and deep learning solutions to derive business value quickly. Before that, she graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, where she got a BS and MS in computer science and math. She likes machine learning because it is a powerful tool and subject that combines math and programming. She is also broadly interested in many machine learning and AI topics, computer graphics and financial investments. Outside of work, she loves traveling (business and personal), reading (emotional novels and research papers), watching movies (romance and sci-fi), shopping (tech gadgets, fashion and beauty products) and exercising. Dance is her favorite way of exercising, and she takes Latin dance and ballet classes regularly. She also plays the guzheng—an ancient Chinese string instrument. She is an INFJ, a very complicated personality. She is also an excellent cook, and she likes to cook authentic Szechuan dishes to host her friends on weekends.- 22nd Annual Wolfram Summer School
- Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA
- June 23–July 11, 2024