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
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.
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.
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Instructors
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
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.
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
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.
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.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.
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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.
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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
Teaching Assistants
- 22nd Annual Wolfram Summer School
- Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA
- June 23–July 11, 2024