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FACULTY
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Stephen Wolfram is the author of A New Kind of
Science and the principal lecturer at the Summer
School. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, and the creator of Mathematica. Having started in science as a
teenager (he got his PhD at age 20), Wolfram had a highly successful
early career in academia. He began his work on NKS in 1981, and spent
ten years writing the NKS book, published in 2002. Over the course of
25 years Wolfram has mentored a large number of individuals who have
achieved great success in academia, business, and elsewhere. Starting
the NKS Summer School was his first formal educational undertaking in
sixteen years. |
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Directors
Todd Rowland is the NKS Summer School's Academic
Director, while Catherine Boucher works as Program Director. |
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Todd
Rowland assisted Stephen Wolfram with mathematical issues
found in A New Kind of Science Chapters 5, 9, and 12. Before joining the NKS team in
2001, he wrote entries for MathWorld. Todd received his PhD from the
University of Chicago in 1999, where he studied traditional
mathematics such as algebraic and differential geometry. Currently, he
is managing editor of Complex Systems. His interests include automated
theorem proving, the fundamental theory, and NKS education.
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Catherine Boucher joined Wolfram Research in 1998. She led
project management during the production of A New Kind of
Science and is currently the Special Projects Director for Wolfram
Research. Catherine received her PhD in applied mathematics from
the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in cluster
analysis.
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Instructors
The following people are both
lecturers and project advisors to the participants of the Summer
School. |
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Jason Cawley has been talking to Stephen
Wolfram about the ideas in A New Kind of Science and reading
early drafts of the work for over 10 years. In the last few years
before publication, Jason worked for Wolfram Research as a research
assistant on historical and philosophical issues, including many
topics covered in the notes. A former graduate student in political
science at the University of Chicago, Jason's wide-ranging interests
include philosophy, social science, and the history of thought. The
developer of the NKS
Forum, he has been its most active Wolfram Research participant,
answering user questions about NKS. He also works on applications of
NKS ideas in the social sciences, arts, and humanities.
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Paul-Jean Letourneau attended
the 2004 NKS Summer
School, where he completed a pure NKS project on elementary
cellular automata with memory. He was invited back as an instructor in
2005 and 2006.
His project developed into his master's thesis in
theoretical physics, "Statistical Mechanics of Cellular Automata with
Memory." He has worked for several industrial and academic
laboratories around North America, where he made original theoretical
and experimental contributions to real-world problems in medical
imaging, protein folding, geophysical data analysis, and DNA-protein
interactions. Paul-Jean now works as a Software Engineer at Wolfram
Research.
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Frederico Meinberg was born in Brazil and did his studies at
Freiburg University, Germany, from which he holds a master's degree in
romance philology. His primary field of research was linguistic typology,
the study of the variety among grammatical structures across the world's
languages. He also has interests in computer science, economics, and the
philosophy of science.
Fred attended the first NKS Summer School, in 2003, where he completed a
project in pure NKS investigating the properties of symbolic systems.
After he finished his MA, Fred joined Wolfram Research as an R&D fellow,
and he's now a research associate at the organization's Boston Special
Projects Office.
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Eric
Rowland
was a student at the first NKS Summer School in 2003. He has
since maintained ties with the NKS community and has continued various
studies of cellular automata, notably the work presented in his 2006 paper
"Local Nested Structure in Rule 30." He is
currently working toward a PhD in mathematics at Rutgers University.
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Matthew
Szudzik made significant contributions
to A New Kind of Science from 1998 through 2000 and during
the summer of 2001 as a research assistant to Stephen Wolfram. His
work focused primarily on the analysis of simple programs and on the
theoretical foundations of computational mathematics. He is currently
a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, working toward
a PhD in mathematical logic. |
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Jamie Williams has recently joined Wolfram Research as a software developer. He
received a PhD in
theoretical low-temperature atomic physics from the University of
Colorado in 1999. Before joining the Wolfram team, Jamie was a scientist
at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, investigating
nonequilibrium dynamics and quantum computing in ultracold atomic
systems. He first encountered the ideas in NKS nearly five years ago while
researching a project on entanglement dynamics in quantum cellular
automata. He is interested in the deployment of NKS-based approaches for
solving real-world problems in physics and chemistry.
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Hector
Zenil attended the 2005
NKS Summer School, where he completed a
pure NKS project on enumerating equational first-order axiom systems.
The next summer he joined Wolfram Research as an R&D fellow. He graduated
with a BS in math from the National University of Mexico (UNAM) and
with a master's degree in logic (LoPhiSS) from the University of Paris I
(Pantheon-Sorbonne). Currently he is a graduate student at Lille 1
University working toward a PhD in Computer Science and from Paris 1
University working toward a PhD in Philosophy, both on complexity and
randomness.
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