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.

Kyle Keane is currently a full-time lecturer at MIT and part-time consultant at Wolfram in the Technical Communications and Strategy Group. Kyle was a research programmer in the Special Projects Department of Wolfram Research from 2012–2015, where he worked on establishing K–12 programming initiatives, including developing a general step-by-step physics and equation solver in Wolfram|Alpha and helping Siri speak Wolfram|Alpha results. His main areas of interest are the pedagogical effectiveness of interactive graphics, evidence-based infusion of programming into science education, improving the accessibility of technology for people with disabilities and user experience. Kyle has a PhD from the University of California, Riverside, where his dissertation was on utilizing weak quantum measurements to protect quantum systems from information loss during quantum computing.

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.

Paul Abbott has used Mathematica extensively since 1988. His research is in the areas of wavelets, quantum physics and special functions, and he has general interests in problems in computational and mathematical physics. All of his publications have used Mathematica in some way. From 1989 to 1991, he worked for Wolfram Research as a member of the Applications department. He was a contributing editor to The Mathematica Journal from 1990 to 2005 and has been a consultant to Wolfram Research since 1997. With Chikara Miyaji, he coauthored the book MathLink: Network Programming with Mathematica. In 2002, he was a winner in the SIAM Hundred-Dollar, Hundred-Digit Challenge, and in 2015 he received a Wolfram Innovator Award.

Paul was a faculty member of the School of Physics at the University of Western Australia (UWA) from 1992 to 2016. He taught courses on a wide range of topics, including electromagnetism, relativity, data analysis, group theory, special functions and wavelets; he also received a number of teaching awards, including a Computational Science Award in 1995 and an Australian University Teaching Award in 2016. Abbott has lectured on Mathematica in the United States, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan and India, and has given Mathematica courses at several Australian universities. These courses have been attended by professionals and students from a wide range of backgrounds, including people from government departments and financial institutions, scientists, engineers, academics and medical researchers.

Organization: Analytica International, Perth, Western Australia. Degrees: BSc (Hons) in physics, the University of Western Australia; PhD in physics, the University of Western Australia. Languages: English. Interests: Computational and theoretical physics, applied mathematics, mathematical modeling, image and signal processing, wavelets, applications of special functions, physics and mathematics courseware design.

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.

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.

Jofre Espigulé Pons has a background in physics. Prior to joining Wolfram, he did research on quantum physics and biophysics, in particular on the magnetoreception of birds and the limits of human vision. He was a student at the Wolfram Summer School 2015, where he used machine learning to identify species of birds based on their songs. He has a broad interest in topics ranging from computational linguistics to computational sports.

Vladimir Grankovsky has worked with broad topics including computer science, electronics design and neuroscience. He is interested in transhumanism, brain-like artificial intelligence and cosmology. He participated in the Wolfram Summer School in 2013 and has been using the Wolfram Language since his first year of university.

Robert Nachbar is a 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, most recently on genealogy.

Matteo Salvarezza joined Wolfram Research in 2016 after attending the Wolfram Summer School. Shortly before that, he earned a PhD in theoretical particle physics (performing research on electroweak physics beyond the Standard Model) at the University of Rome "La Sapienza," Italy.

At Wolfram Research, he is part of the machine learning group and works on developing tools and applications for the Wolfram Language, with a particular focus on neural networks.

His most important personal interest is, by far, music—he has been playing guitar, keenly listening and composing music for the last 14 years.

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

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 the 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.

Jonathan Gorard is currently a research student in applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge, where his primary interests are in general relativity and cosmology and their interface with quantum gravity. Having published his first scientific paper at 17, his publication record now spans combinatorics, computational complexity theory, mathematical logic, mathematical physics, applied statistics, recursion theory, the theory of complex systems and many other fields. His papers on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics were previously showcased by the UK Institute of Physics, and he has proved several theorems relating to the ideas of NKS (particularly regarding computational irreducibility, computational equivalence and undecidability in physical systems). Jonathan attended the Wolfram Summer School as an undergraduate in 2017, where his project to integrate automated theorem-proving capabilities into the Wolfram Language ultimately evolved to become the Mathematica 11.3 function FindEquationalProof. Ever since that summer, he has been employed as a consultant to the Algorithms R&D Group at Wolfram, where he has worked to spearhead the company's efforts in automated theorem-proving, and is also involved more generally with projects on the semantic representation of mathematics, type theory and relativistic/astronomical computation. In his spare time, Jonathan enjoys Mediterranean food, jazz music, reading/arguing about philosophy and climbing mountains.

Garrett Ducharme earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with a computer science minor at the University of Illinois, located in Champaign, Illinois. Garrett has been with Wolfram Research since May 2015. He works mostly on paclets that may require lower-level C/C++. A few projects he is currently working on include WolframScript, ExternalEvaluate, ProcessLink (RunProcess, StartProcess, SystemProcesses), SSH (RemoteConnect, RemoteRunProcess), NetworkPacketCapture and ReadByteArray.

In his free time, he enjoys 3D printing, designing circuits and programming for his own small projects.

Daavid Väänänen has a passion for advancing humanity by improving accessibility to high-quality education and applying emerging technologies to enhance organizational excellence and life quality for all. Since attending the Wolfram Summer School in 2017, he has been advocating and developing Wolfram Language–based resources as a Wolfram Community Ambassador, particularly with the Wolfram Foundation's Computational Thinking Initiatives. He holds a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. As a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University, he continued research on nonlinear dynamics of many-body quantum systems applied to astrophysical environments, as well as promoted educational outreach and public engagement. He also holds a group fitness instructor certificate and enjoys yoga, rock climbing, gardening and other outdoor activities. He firmly believes that by acting together, our persistent efforts will be able to transfer our optimistic ideas into positive realities for all people.

Meghan Rieu-Werden joined Wolfram Research in 2017 as a data manager for the Advanced Research Group. She earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Bridgewater State University and a graduate certificate in database management and business intelligence from Boston University. She has been working in research since 2006 on various topics such as postgraduate medical education, preventive medicine and machine learning. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, gardening, crossword puzzles and crochet.

Anush Mehrabyan participated in the Wolfram High School Summer Camp in the United States as a student in 2015. She believes that it was one of the best experiences she has ever had. In 2015, Anush participated in a conference at Glasgow University in Scotland. She recently graduated from UWC Robert Bosch College in Germany. During her college life, Anush was a co-organizer on the UWC Peace One Day committee in Germany, volunteered in a refugee camp and organized various projects in France, Italy and the Czech Republic. In 2016, Anush worked as a program coordinator at the Wolfram Summer School Armenia. In May 2017, Anush worked as a guest manager during the Aurora Prize event in Armenia. In 2017, she will attend the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. Anush enjoys traveling and exploring different cultures.

Swede White is a media and communications specialist at Wolfram Research. Prior to being recruited by Wolfram Research, Swede was a doctoral student in sociology at Louisiana State University and left "all but dissertation." However, he still conducts research centering around identity, networks and methodology. Specifically, he examines the relationship between identity formation, digital technologies and social networks. ​

Prior to graduate school, Swede worked in public media, waited tables at a quaint Italian restaurant, owned a commercial recording studio and spent time in the family business supervising asbestos abatement projects. ​

When not writing about himself in the third person, Swede enjoys great conversation, cooking Southern cuisine as a pretend vegetarian, studying human interaction and old James Bond movies.