I CONSIDER stephen wolfram to be a great benefactor of humanity the foundation for this opinion is that I am a daily user of the Mathematica software package, Wolfram’s brainchild and the source of his considerable fortune. This wonderful tool allows me to do experimental mathematics, of a type that would have been impossible as little as 15 years ago without much wearisome programming. I can try out formulas, conjectures, and theorems with actual numbers to see what they turn up; I can plot graphs in two and three dimensions; I can factorize, differentiate, integrate, solve equations, invert matrices, and extract eigenvalues to my happy heart’s content.
As well as having created this splendid product and made himself rich by astutely marketing it, Wolfram is impressively credentialed as a working scientist. He was a child prodigy, publishing his first paper on particle physics at age 15, going on to acquire a Ph.D. from Caltech when he was just 20, and proceeding quickly to important results in quantum field theory and cosmology. Stephen Wolfram is, without much doubt, one of the smartest people on the planet.
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