Who invented wolfram

You see, in a sense, right now Wolfram Alpha is a bit old-fashioned with respect to that. But one of the points of NKS is that you can go onto into the computational universe, and in effect make new, creative discoveries automatically. So that instead of just using existing methods and models and so on, Wolfram Alpha can potentially discover new ones on the fly.

It was that way with Mathematica , and with NKS. Wolfram Alpha in a sense makes possible a new kind of computing: knowledge-based computing. And then building up computations. It was in a sense very liberating with Wolfram Alpha to take such a different approach to functionality and interface than in Mathematica.

They seemed in a sense quite incompatible. But now as we bring them together, we see that there is amazing strength in that diversity. Well, one consequence of that is that one builds lots of technology along the way. That has its own significance. You know, I was thinking about Wolfram Alpha, and about the long chain of circumstances that have led us to be able to build it.

But I had my 50 th birthday last year. And for that I was looking at a bunch of archived material I have. There, with a typewriter and mapping pen, were collections of knowledge set up as best I could then. Of course, I started typing in things from old stuff, and, yes, modern Wolfram Alpha gets them right. But I realized that in some sense I was probably fated for nearly 40 years to build a Wolfram Alpha.

Some of what will happen with them we can foresee. But some—as we build out these new paradigms—will be as seemingly unexpected as Wolfram Alpha. It was quite tense. We were going to launch Wolfram Alpha. Leibniz was talking about a version of it years ago.

But I decided that we should give it a try. It had all started with some abstract intellectual ideas. Some news had come out about our project. So there was a lot of anticipation.

Well, at the appointed time we started the live webcast. There was a horrible networking and load balancing problem. Well, fortunately we did actually have good weather and news feeds. Because this was May in the Midwest. Here, we can actually look at live Wolfram Alpha to find out about it.

See that giant spike in wind speed just before 8pm? That was a tornado. Approaching our location. But still, we had a tornado coming straight for us. Well, fortunately, at the last minute, it turned away.

And our giant project was launched—out of the starting gate. The story goes a long way back. I was a kid, growing up in England in the s. At first, I had really been into the space program. A thing called an Elliott C. About the size of a large desk. With 8K of bit words of core memory. And programmed with paper tape. Well, I started programming that machine.

My top goal was to reproduce this physics process. And in the process, I learned quite a bit about programming. And it might have been a disqualifying handicap. I wanted to make a very general system. Well, almost exactly 30 years ago today the system first came alive.

And in the system was to the point where it could really be released. I was by then a young faculty member in physics at Caltech. But the company did get started. Well, at first I thought about all sorts of complicated models for that. So I started looking at the very simplest possible programs. Well, here was the big experiment I did.

In line-printer-output form from Well, in nature we see lots of complexity. Well, I thought this was pretty exciting. Well, I did lots of work in this direction myself. And I pulled in quite a few other people as well. And I wanted to start some kind of institute for the science too. So it was hard really to fully staff up. But so I decided I need to build a new, more general, computational system. And that I needed to start and run a company to do that. Right here in Champaign, Illinois.

At first, of course, it was a tiny operation. And very quickly we started to grow our company in Champaign. And gradually we realized how to do this. In a sense my idea with it was to use it automate as much as possible. All algorithms.

All forms of computation. So it gets easier and easier to build. But by now, math is a small part of what Mathematica does. Well, so things with Mathematica were going really well. Well, then the web came along. And we started doing things with that. With the numbers going up and down in different calculus seasons and so on.

One day I expect that methodology will be the dominant one in engineering. And that will be the real mega-killer industry of NKS. But back in , I was thinking about the first killer app for NKS. Of course, it helped that we had Mathematica. But still, there were many things that could wrong. And it might not be possible to curate it in any reasonable way. Or there might be too many different models and methods to implement. With everything having to be separately built for every tiny subspecialty.

So we have to solve the problem of getting the system to understand that. Or whether I was off by a decade, or five decades. But still, around I decided it was worth a try. We started on things like countries and chemicals and things like polyhedra. Who have been incredibly helpful to us. Meanwhile, we were busily constructing what would become Wolfram Alpha. But in a sense we were cheating. Implementing all those methods and models and so on.

Well, then what about the natural language understanding? Over the course of three decades, we have progressively built an unprecedented base of technology that now makes possible our broad portfolio of innovative products. At the center is the revolutionary Wolfram Language , which defines a unique convergence of computation and knowledge.

First released in , Mathematica is our original, longstanding flagship product—and a major force in the technical and educational communities with millions of dedicated users around the world. Built on our global technology base, Mathematica represents a unique blend of major research breakthroughs, outstanding user-oriented design and world-class software engineering.

The rise of computation has been a major world theme for the past 50 years. Our goal is to provide the framework to let computation achieve its full potential in the decades to come: to make it possible to compute whatever can be computed, whenever and wherever it is needed, and to make accessible the full frontiers of the computational universe. In , building on what is now the Wolfram Language, we introduced Wolfram Alpha —for the first time making large-scale computational knowledge a practical reality and introducing a host of unexpected new technology directions.

Used by millions of people every day on the web, through mobile apps and intelligent assistants and in enterprise deployments, Wolfram Alpha represents one of the most complex and ambitious software projects of all time and a major intellectual and technological achievement. Our organization has been built to focus on long-term goals while consistently delivering the best possible products and services on an ongoing basis. Led by CEO Stephen Wolfram, we have assembled over the past three decades a team of remarkable breadth and depth, continually attracting outstanding new talent to our uniquely productive intellectual environment.

As intellectual pioneers, our organization maintains a deep commitment to communication and education. Not only are our products used at schools, colleges and universities throughout the world, but we have also developed the world's largest free network of technical and computational websites, and we are defining new curriculum directions as well as offering a variety of innovative student programs—which have served as a rich training ground for future leaders in science and technology.

In , a patent was granted to the engineer Robert Oxland. This included the preparation of sodium tungstate, formation of tungstic acid, and the reduction to the metallic form by oil, tar or charcoal.

The work constituted an important step in modern tungsten chemistry, and opened the way to industrialisation. First, tungsten-containing steels were patented in , leading to the first self-hardening steels in Such steels Taylor- and White are still used today in practically every machine shop of the world.

The first tungsten light bulbs were patented in , and rapidly replaced the less efficient carbon filament lamps on the lighting market. Since then, tungsten filaments have illuminated the world and have revolutionized artificial lighting in general. To produce drawing dies with diamond-like hardness but improved toughness was the driving force for the development of cemented carbides in the s.

At this time, no one, even the most optimistic, could imagine the enormous breakthrough for this material in the tooling industry. After WW2, a huge market opened in the growing economies and cemented carbides contributed as tool materials and construction parts for their industrial development.

To compare the evolution of a technology with the growth of a tree was a unique idea which has since been developed and expanded from