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 Science Summer School) was his first formal educational undertaking in sixteen years.

Lizzie joined Wolfram Research in 2014. She is currently the team manager and a technical project manager for Wolfram's Advanced Research Group, working from the company headquarters in Champaign, Illinois. This is her first year as program director of the Wolfram Summer Programs, and she participated last year as well. She is excited to share in this experience and make it valuable and memorable for everyone involved. In her spare time, she enjoys music and playing piano, traveling, shopping for unique trinkets, video games and learning about new technology. She has a BSc in applied mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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.

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.

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.

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 the Wolfram Language.

His interests span from natural sciences to Karate-Do, across Italian cantautori (singer-songwriters), science fiction and politics.

Carlo Barbieri holds a PhD in physics from ENS in Paris. His current research interests are on the boundary between physics, biology and informatics. During his thesis "Inverse problems in biophysics," he worked on developing algorithms to extract biologically relevant information from biophysics experiments such as DNA micromanipulation or neural activity recordings. He spent one year as a visiting PhD student at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He earned a master's in physics from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", in his hometown, focusing on Boolean satisfiability and the statistical physics of complex systems.

He now works for Wolfram in the Advanced Research Group, and has developed the automated data analysis functionality for Wolfram|Alpha. He now works on Wolfram Cloud features such as instant forms and APIs. He is a music lover, an avid traveler and a bike maniac. He finds it weird to talk about himself in the third person.

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.

Etienne Bernard is the lead developer of the Machine Learning Group at Wolfram Research, where he focuses on developing machine learning functionalities for the Wolfram Language. His work aims to simplify the practice of machine learning in order to spread its usage. Etienne obtained a PhD in physics from ENS Paris, where he designed Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms to solve physics problems. He also worked as a postdoctoral scholar at MIT on Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms and non-equilibrium statistical physics.

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.

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.

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.

Presentations

• The Analysis of an S-K Combinator Expression
• A Survey of "Other" Rule Systems
• Turing Machines
• The Enumeration of Computational Systems
• Emulation and Irreducibility
• The Analysis of a Turing Machine
• Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics

Christopher Wolfram is a full-stack programmer and algorithm developer who has been programming in the 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 in the Wolfram Summer Programs for five years.