
Stephen Wolfram
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
YEARS: 2011
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.
YEARS: 2011