Stephen Wolfram

1959– · British-American scientist and businessman (born 1959)

Topics: programming, complexity, physics

• [In] Ancient Babylon... they were trying to predict three kinds of things.... where the planets would be, what the weather would be like, and who would win or lose a certain battle; and they had no idea which of these things would be more predictable than the other.

  — Stephen Wolfram

• It's always seemed like a big mystery how nature, seemingly so effortlessly, manages to produce so much that seems to us so complex. Well, I think we found its secret. It's just sampling what's out there in the computational universe.

  — Stephen Wolfram

• I think Computation is destined to be the defining idea of our future.

  — Stephen Wolfram

• I'm committed to seeing this project done. To see if within this decade we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe, and know where our universe lies in the space of all possible universes.

  — Stephen Wolfram

• I had a very selfish reason for building Mathematica. I wanted to use it myself, a bit like Galileo got to use his telescope four hundred years ago. But I wanted to look, not at the astronomical universe, but at the computational universe.

  — Stephen Wolfram

• Could it be that some place out there in the computational universe, we might find our physical universe?

  — Stephen Wolfram