WOLFRAM

Wolfram Summer School

2011 Faculty All 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.
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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.

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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

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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.

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Instructors

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.
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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.

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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.
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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.

Presentations

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Taliesin Beynon

Instructors

Taliesin Beynon was a development lead in the Advanced Research group at Wolfram Research who worked on deep learning functionality for Wolfram Language. He studied honors math at the University of Cape Town.
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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.
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Teaching Assistants

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.

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