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.

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.

Jesse Friedman

Technical Developer

Jesse is a software engineer with a focus on networked applications, systems integration and cloud computing. He enjoys long random walks on Euclidean planes and not writing bios.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.