Stephen Wolfram's Mathematica software system launched in 1988 has been central to technical research and education for more than a generation. His work on basic science---summarized in his bestselling book A New Kind of Science---has defined a major new intellectual direction, with applications across the sciences, technology and the arts. In 2009 Wolfram built on his earlier work to launch Wolfram|Alpha to make as much of the world's knowledge as possible computable---and accessible on the web and in intelligent assistants like Apple's Siri.

In 2014, as a culmination of more than 30 years of work, Wolfram began to roll out the Wolfram Language, which dramatically raises the level of automation and built-in knowledge available in a programming language, and makes possible a new generation of readily deployed computational applications.

Stephen Wolfram has been the CEO of Wolfram Research since its founding in 1987. He was educated at Eton, Oxford and Caltech, receiving his PhD in theoretical physics at the age of 20.