This book of thoroughly engaging essays from one of today's most prodigious innovators provides a uniquely personal perspective on the lives and achievements of a selection of intriguing figures from the history of science and technology. Weaving together his immersive interest in people and history with insights gathered from his own experiences, Stephen Wolfram gives an ennobling look at some of the individuals whose ideas and creations have helped shape our world today. From his recollections about working with Richard Feynman to his insights about how Alan Turing's work has unleashed generations of innovation to the true role of Ada Lovelace in the history of computing, Wolfram takes the reader into the minds and lives of great thinkers and creators of the past few centuries and shows how great achievements can arise from dramatically different personalities and life trajectories. Preface Richard Feynman Kurt Gödel Alan Turing John von Neumann George Boole Ada Lovelace Gottfried Leibniz Benoit Mandelbrot Steve Jobs Marvin Minsky Russell Towle Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead Richard Crandall Srinivasa Ramanujan Solomon Golomb
Author
Stephen Wolfram's parents were Jewish refugees who emigrated from Germany to England in the 1930s. Wolfram's father Hugo was a textile manufacturer and novelist (Into a Neutral Country) and his mother Sybil was a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. He has a younger brother, Conrad. Wolfram is married to a mathematician and has four children. He was educated at Eton College, but claimed to be bored and left it prematurely in 1976. He entered St John's College, Oxford at age 17 but found lectures "awful", and left in 1978 without graduating. He received a Ph.D. in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology at age 20,[8] joined the faculty there and received one of the first MacArthur awards in 1981, at age 21. Wolfram presented a talk at the TED conference in 2010, and he was named Speaker of the Event for his 2012 talk at SXSW. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
