Stephen Wolfram

     Stephen Wolfram, is a very knowledgeable scientist that does not seem to be satisfied with what he knows already because he knows there is so much more out there to be discovered and learned.  He has spent many years of his life studying, learning, experimenting, and silently working on his book, A New Kind of Science.  Although he initially received various reactions about his book, some good and some what were not, he opted to have 50,000 copies of his book printed.  His book was released on May 14, 2002 and surprisingly enough, all 50,000 copies of his book were spoken for by the end of the day which gave him more motivation to continue on with the studies he had begun.  Another one of his creations he introduced in 1988 was Mathematica, a computational software program used in many scientific, engineering, mathematical and computing fields based on symbolic mathematics. 

     His creation of Mathematica was the tool used to make A New Kind of Science possible.  His book, A New Kind of Science was released on May 14, 2002, was primarily written to a wide range of fundamental problems in science such as the possibility of a truly fundamental theory of physics, the development of complexity in biology, the interplay between free will and determinism, and the character of intelligence in the universe.  His goal was to have three big things emerge:  a new area of basic science concerned with understanding what is out there in the computational world, many applications to science and technology amongst other things that nature can do, and to obtain a conceptual direction to be able to better understand the fundamental characters of science and mathematics and the places we have in our universe.  

“Well this is rather amazing.  We have a very simple rule, we’re starting off from single black cell, but what we’re getting out is an incredibly complicated pattern, seems in many ways random. So it just doesn’t seem right, we put so little in, yet we’re getting so much out.  It’s not what our ordinary intuition says should happen.  I mean, in our everyday experience in say, doing engineering, what we’re used to is that to make something complicated we somehow have to start off with complicated plans or use complicated rules, but what we’re seeing here is that actually even extremely simple rules can produce incredibly complicated behavior”