Stephen Wolfram
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.
YEARS: 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003
Todd Rowland—Academic 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 the managing editor of Complex Systems. His interests include automated theorem proving, the fundamental theory, and NKS education.
Presentations from Todd Rowland
YEARS: 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003
Catherine Boucher—Program Director
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.
YEARS: 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003
Abigail Nussey—Event Director
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 published in Complex Systems. She writes the NKS Blog, runs a BBS community geared toward polymaths, sings classical soprano, and writes science fiction novels.
Jan Baetens
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 and 2010. In the framework of his ongoing PhD research, he addresses the usability of CA for describing biological spatio-temporal processes as well as the stability characteristics of CA. The research has led to several published papers and Wolfram Demonstrations. Currently, he is affiliated with Ghent University, at which he teaches several mathematics courses.
Taliesin Beynon
Taliesin Beynon is a research programmer in the advanced research group at Wolfram|Alpha. His research interests include machine learning, natural language processing, data mining, and Dataviz. His previous NKS work has focused on graph automata and two-dimensional Turing machines.
Vitaliy Kaurov
Vitaliy Kaurov received his PhD in theoretical physics from The City University of New York. He was an assistant professor at the College of Staten Island, where he taught math and physics and did research in the physics of ultra-cold quantum gases. Participation in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project rekindled the old interest in NKS that he had carried since his undergraduate studies in Ukraine. He attended the NKS Summer School 2010, where he investigated the relation between 1D and 2D cellular automata. He joined the technical communication and strategy group at Wolfram Research in 2010.
YEARS: 2011
Paul-Jean Letourneau
Paul-Jean Letourneau attended the NKS Summer School 2004, 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 lead developer of computational biology for Wolfram|Alpha.
Katarina Miljkovic
Katarina Miljkovic has written for symphony orchestra, string orchestra, and various other groupings, including works for amplified solo instruments and electronics, saxophone quartet, electric guitar, and percussion. Ms. Miljkovic has been exploring the relationship of music, science, and nature. This initially led her to the Benoit Mandelbrot essay "The Fractal Geometry of Nature". The study resulted in her cycle, "Forest", for two prepared pianos and percussion, released by Sachimay Records. Currently, Ms. Miljkovic is working on mapping elementary rules from A New Kind of Science, by Stephen Wolfram, to sound. She presented her exploration in this new field at the NKS international conferences in 2004, 2006, and 2007; NKS Summer School 2004 and 2009; the 2005 Wolfram Technology Conference; soundaXis 2006 in Toronto; the 2007 International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music, held in Berlin; and Cambridge Science Festival, 2009 and 2010. Katarina Miljkovic established her carrier as a composer in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia. In 1992, she moved to Boston for doctoral studies in music composition at the New England Conservatory of Music. Currently, Katarina Miljkovic is a full-time faculty member at New England Conservatory of Music, where she has been teaching since 1997.
YEARS: 2011
Matthew Szudzik
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 holds a PhD in mathematical logic from Carnegie Mellon University and is an assistant teaching professor of mathematics at their campus in Doha, Qatar.
Presentations from Matthew Szudzik
YEARS: 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003
Michael Sollami
Michael Sollami spends much of his time studying the intersection of pure math and computational systems. After graduating from Trinity College in 2006 with a BS in computer science, Michael headed the quantitative department at the global hedge fund Warisan Capital. Michael eventually returned to academics, and he graduated in 2009 with an MS in pure mathematics. Following a research programming job at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Michael enrolled as a doctoral candidate in the mathematics department at the University of Wyoming. He is currently working toward a PhD in computational discrete mathematics. In 2010, he interned at Wolfram Research as a research associate for the Wolfram|Alpha project and also participated in the NKS Summer School in Burlington, Vermont. Since that most inspirational year, he has continued NKS-driven research in graph theory, algebraic combinatoric, and theoretical computer science. Aside from coding and proofs, Michael enjoys dabbling in piano composition, graphic design, and poetry.
YEARS: 2011
