
Stephen Wolfram
?>
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.
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.
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.
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.
YEARS: 2016
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.