Stephen Wolfram Q&A
Submit a questionSome collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram
Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.
Personal History
(32)March 3, 1993
From: Interview by Paul Wellin, Mathematica in Education
You went to Oxford for college, but never finished there—so what led from there to Caltech?
I was pretty much on the track of doing particle physics research, and being a physics undergraduate at Oxford wasn’t a particularly useful environment in which to do particle physics research. Since I had the opportunity fairly easily to go to graduate school in the US, I decided to do that and I chose to go to Caltech. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Chicago Software Newspaper
Was the MacArthur Fellowship grant what enabled you to start Wolfram Research?
No, that wasn’t really enough. I made some money from the previous company and I made money doing consulting work too. Also, the costs of launching a software company aren’t that great. I tell people that if a software company costs more than a million dollars to launch you are doing something wrong. Read more
September 30, 1996
From: Interview by Robers Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times
You went from Caltech to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies to the University of Illinois, and now you are on your own. Is it easier outside the university?
My view about doing basic science is that if you have no choice, then getting paid by a university is a fine thing to do. If you have a choice, there are a lot better ways to live.
In my life now, where I am a CEO of a company, the actual fraction of my time that I can get to devote to basic science thinking is probably much larger than the fraction of time that a typical senior professor at a university would get to devote to actual basic research. Read more
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
If I calculated correctly, 2001: A Space Odyssey must have come out when you were nine years old. Did you see it then?
Definitely. In fact, it was my favorite movie, and I ended up seeing it quite a few times.
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
What was it that you liked about 2001: A Space Odyssey?
All the technology. It had such a rich rendering of technology. So bright and attractive. I followed the US space program quite a bit in those days, but I was always disappointed when I realized that the inside of a spacecraft was just the size of a closet. In 2001 there were masses of technology, Read more
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
Did you identify with any of the characters in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Not really. At the time, I was young, and they all seemed quite old, and very American. Growing up in England, all that “Roger your plan to go EVA” stuff seemed pretty foreign to me. I guess I didn’t ever imagine talking jargon like that. One thing, though, was that I definitely was very interested in one day being able to interact with the kind of technology that was in the movie. Read more
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
What struck you most about 2001: A Space Odyssey watching it now, in your adulthood?
Well, it seemed a lot shorter than when I was a kid. It also seemed to make a lot more sense. I guess I now at least think I understand how all the pieces are supposed to fit together. And they really raise some very interesting questions. But let’s talk about that later. Read more
July 7, 2002
From: Interview by Loch Adamson, The New York Times
You were a child prodigy. Was that a burden?
I consider myself a very peculiar case of the child-prodigy phenomenon. I was fortunate enough to go through educational tracks that included lots of other smart kids. I suppose if somebody had asked me when I was a teenager writing particle-physics papers, do I think that there are a lot of other teenagers doing the same thing, Read more
April 7, 2003
From: Interview by The Scientist Magazine
What did you do for fun as a child?
When I was a kid, the thing that I was interested in was science. In doing science, if I wanted to get to the local university library, I had to bicycle. I suppose the bicycling was a more traditional kid thing to do.
April 7, 2003
From: Interview by The Scientist Magazine
Has having children changed how you think about life, about science, about yourself?
I’m lucky enough to have children who are interested in understanding all sorts of things, and it’s certainly been fascinating to figure out how to explain science and business and so on to them. They’ve taught me a lot.
July 1, 2008
From: Interview by Luciano Floridi, Philosophy of Computing and Information: 5 Questions
Why were you initially drawn to computational and/or informational issues?
At first, it was a very practical thing. I always believe in using the best tools. And in the early 1970s (when I was an early teenager), I happened to get interested in physics. And I realized that the best way to figure out some things I wanted to figure out in physics was to use a computer. Read more
November 12, 2008
From: Interview by Carlos Gershenson, Complexity: 5 Questions
Why did you begin working with complex systems?
It’s a slightly complex story. I started working in physics when I was an early teenager. Mostly I worked on particle physics, but I also thought a lot about the foundations of thermodynamics and statistical physics. And around 1978 I got very interested in the question of how complex structure arises in the universe—from galaxies on down. Read more
March 5, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What got you into mathematics in the first place? What is your favorite piece of mathematics? i.e theorem, proof, fact, construction etc.
Actually, I was first interested in physics… and I learned mathematics as support for that.
I’m not sure if it completely counts as mathematics, but I guess it’s the possibility of universal computation. I think that’s the most important thing that’s been discovered in the past century, and perhaps a lot more.
March 5, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Was there anything you wish your parents had done differently to make your early education smoother as a child? What about social skills?
I think Wikipedia may overstate the difficulty of my education 🙂
I went to some very good schools in England, and typically did rather well. However, starting from probably age 8 or so, I ended up learning the things I was really interested in outside of school, from books, etc. (I wish the web had existed; Read more
May 12, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What do you remember most about your time at Eton? Do you have any favorite moments? Least favorite?
I learned all these “useless” subjects, like Latin and Greek… and the bizarre thing is that (a) I still remember most of what I learned, and (b) I’ve actually ended up using a fair fraction of what I learned! (Think: naming products etc.)
I was a “King’s Scholar” at Eton… I think the king in question was Henry VI, Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Given that you received your PhD at such a young age compared to many others in your field, what was that experience like in the formative years of your career?
It was great! It was really nice to be “launched” and not to have years of school ahead of me.
It’s a little weird now, because my “contemporaries” 30 years ago were quite a bit older than me… so while I think I’m still in my prime, a lot of my contemporaries are retiring etc.
July 27, 2015
From: Interview by Byron Reese, Gigaom
When do you first remember hearing the term “artificial intelligence”?
That is a good question. I don’t have any idea. When I was a kid, in the 1960s in England, I think there was a prevailing assumption that it wouldn’t be long before there were automatic brains of some kind, and I certainly had books about the future at that time, Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
Are there any things you miss now that you’re an outsider to traditional academia?
I have many friends in academia, and end up interacting quite a lot with academia in one way or another: giving talks, meeting with groups of students, etc.
But I’ve now spent several decades building an environment where I can implement ideas incredibly much faster than I ever could in academia… Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What’s the earliest program you can remember writing?
It was 1972 or 1973 and I was about 13 years old… and I got access to a computer. It was an Elliott 903C programmed with 8 kilowords of (18-bit) ferrite core memory, and programmed with paper tape, and about the size of a large desk.
I wrote a few tiny programs, Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What do you miss about England that America doesn’t immediately offer?
The candy 🙂 And now there’s even a ban on the import of some British candy to the US.
When I was growing up in England I was always frustrated by what seemed like an irrational level of respect for older people there. And I often said that England would be a good place to be older in, Read more
featured
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
How did you manage to start legitimate research on quantum field theory when you were only 15?
I discovered that one could learn things pretty well by reading books (well, today it would be reading the web). I always found (and still find) it much much easier to learn things when I have a particular question I’m trying to answer, or project I’m trying to do. At that time lots of things were happening in particle physics, Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
You have an uncommon experience of being (and being around) many prominent figures in the scientific community. How has this influenced the development of the Wolfram Language?
Designing a language that’s supposed to “know about everything” means one has to know about a lot of things oneself! It’s been absolutely crucial that I’ve been exposed to lots of different areas, and gotten to know the originators of lots of fields. At a practical level, it’s very common that I’ll want to get some judgement call on some detailed thing in some particular area. Read more
November 7, 2016
From: Interview by Dingyu Chen, Eton Magazine
What first inspired you to create Wolfram|Alpha?
I was already thinking about making knowledge computable back when I was at Eton more than 40 years ago. For a long time I thought the only way to make a system like that would be to build something that basically emulates a brain. But as a result of a bunch of basic science I did in the 1990s, Read more
November 7, 2016
From: Interview by Dingyu Chen, Eton Magazine
What pushed you to study quantum and particle physics, especially starting from such a young age?
Back when I was at Eton in the early to mid-1970s, particle physics was the most rapidly advancing field of science. It was an exciting time: there were significant new discoveries every few weeks. And it was really exciting for me to be part of that. Today that kind of excitement is what you find in lots of new “computational X” Read more
April 3, 2018
From: Interview by Harrison Tasoff, Space.com
How did 2001: A Space Odyssey affect the projects you’ve embarked on and the approach you took to them?
The notion of computers as visual things is probably something that I viscerally absorbed from 2001. Because at the time when 2001 came out, computers were absolutely not visual things. In the first computer I used, its only form of IO [input/ output] was a paper tape reader and punch and a tele-printer. Read more
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette
What is the worst job you ever had?
I haven’t really had standard kinds of job-with-a-boss types of jobs. I’ve been a CEO for more than half my life, and before that I was a professor for a while.
As it happens, the last class I taught as a professor, back in 1988, was the only undergraduate course I ever taught. Read more
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette (unpublished)
What’s the most beneficial college class you’ve taken?
My college experience (at Oxford University) was rather nonstandard. I went to college fairly young (age 16), but was already doing physics research, etc. The way the Oxford system worked at the time, one was only studying one subject (physics, in my case) and one didn’t actually have to go to lectures. Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
What was it like to grow up in England in the ’60s?
I don’t know. I thought that I was a typical growing-up-in-the-’60s kid in England. I got really interested in space because space was a thing that was happening at that time, and that was a very American-oriented thing. In England at that time, the US seemed like a pretty far-off place. Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
Growing up, did you play any sports? Were you just a nerd?
I didn’t do sports. I actually had elaborate schemes for avoiding doing sports. For example, cricket was a big thing, and the few times I ended up playing cricket I discovered that cricket has this thing called overs: when the whole field is reflected, and people change their positions, perhaps because they’re getting so damn bored standing around. Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
Is it true that you had difficulty learning arithmetic in school?
Oh yeah. I was terrible at arithmetic. I found it boring. In one of these educational lessons about education, when I was seven or something, there was always this game of who can do arithmetic facts, and I discovered that there’s only one fact that you needed to know to win that game most of the time, Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
Who were your heroes when you were at Eton?
I wasn’t really a very hero-oriented character. I didn’t really have… I mean, I wanted to be a physicist at that time. I knew about a bunch of the famous physicists of then and the famous physicists of before then. I started meeting those people by the time I was 14, Read more
March 31, 2020
From: Jai Preston
How early on did you notice this part of your character that is so obsessed with uncharted territory?
Looking back it’s pretty clear I was always that way. But my self image was just that I “did things”. I didn’t really pay attention to the fact that they were things that hadn’t been done before. In fact, I don’t think I really internalized that until I had to go to effort explaining to other people why they should care about the organizational things I was trying to build …