FACULTY

	Stephen Wolfram is the author of A New Kind of Science and the principal lecturer at the Summer School. He is the creator of Mathematica, the creator of Wolfram\|Alpha, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. 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 30 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.

Directors Todd Rowland is the NKS Summer School's academic director, Catherine Boucher is the program director, and Abigail Nussey is the event director.

	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.

	Catherine Boucher joined Wolfram Research in 1998. She led project management during the production of A New Kind of Science and is currently the Director of Special Projects for Wolfram Research. Her team is responsible for early development of new initiatives at Wolfram Research along with projects related to Wolfram Science. She and her team led the original development of Wolfram\|Alpha and currently handle its mathematical content and parser development. Catherine received her PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in cluster analysis.

	Abigail Nussey joined Wolfram Research as a special projects coordinator in 2007. She has a bachelor's degree in physics (2004) and a master's degree in math (2007) from Boston University. She participated in the NKS Summer School in 2008 and 2010, and was a teaching assistant in 2009. She presented on cellular automata over graph topologies at the 2008 Midwest NKS Conference, which was later written into an article and just recently published in the Journal of Complex Systems. She writes The NKS Blog, runs a BBS community geared toward polymaths, sings classical soprano, and writes science fiction novels.

Instructors The following people are both lecturers and project advisors to the participants of the Summer School.

	Jan Baetens graduated as an environmental engineer from Ghent University in 2007, after which he joined that university's research unit Knowledge-based Systems (KERMIT). Having struggled with traditional modeling approaches and their weaknesses while completing his master's thesis, he finds that cellular automata provide an alternate perspective for solving engineering problems. He attended the NKS Summer School 2008 to expand his knowledge of the topic, and was an instructor for the NKS Summer School 2009. He is currently working on a PhD on the usability of cellular automata in environmental engineering at Ghent University, and teaches several mathematics courses.

	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 15 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. Jason's graduate studies were in political science at the University of Chicago, and his 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.

	Paul-Jean Letourneau attended the 2004 NKS Summer School, where he completed a pure NKS project on elementary cellular automata with memory. He has been an instructor at the Summer School since 2005. His 2004 project developed into his master's thesis in theoretical physics, "Statistical Mechanics of Cellular Automata with Memory." He has worked in several industrial and academic laboratories around North America, where he made original contributions to real-world problems in medical imaging, geophysical seismic imaging, protein structure prediction, and DNA-protein interactions. Paul-Jean is now a software engineer at Wolfram Research.

	Eric Rowland is a postdoctoral researcher in the mathematics department at Tulane University. He was a participant at the NKS Summer School 2003 and has since continued NKS-informed research in number theory, combinatorics, and computer science. In 2008 he proved that a simple recurrence discovered at the Summer School generates primes.

	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 doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, working toward a PhD in mathematical logic.

	Jamie Williams is a senior computable data architect with the Wolfram\|Alpha team. 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 in 2002 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, as well as the application of NKS methodology in the architecture of computational knowledge systems.

	Hector Zenil joined Wolfram Research as an R&D fellow in 2006. 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 Sorbonne. He is a graduate student at Lille 1 and Paris 1 universities in computer science and philosophy of science, both on algorithmic complexity and randomness. He has been an intern at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University, and is a senior research associate for the Wolfram\|Alpha project.

Teaching Assistants

	Erin Craig graduated from New College of Florida with a BA in mathematics. Inspired by the beauty of both algebra and automata, she spent her final year of college at University of California, Berkeley exploring an extension of rule 90 to cellular automata over non-Abelian groups. Erin attended the NKS Summer School in 2009, where she explored reducibility of string substitution systems. She joined Wolfram Research as a software developer in 2009.

	Taliesin Beynon is fascinated by most things. He dropped out of junior high and taught himself electronics and programming, doing experiments with old TVs and microwaves and reading articles and essays online, all back in the days of dial-up. He studied mathematics and physics at the university of Cape Town in South Africa, and has worked for a few startups. He attended the NKS Summer School 2009, and joined the Wolfram\|Alpha team in January 2010. His current interests include all kinds of technology, the grunge science of artificial life, and writing the odd bit of poetry.