Coordinates: 40°05′50″N 88°14′44″W / 40.097128°N 88.245690°W / 40.097128; -88.245690

Wolfram Research is a private company that makes computation software. The founder and CEO of Wolfram Research is Stephen Wolfram, scientist and author, who maintains close involvement with the development of Mathematica.

The primary software product of Wolfram Research is the program Mathematica, an environment for technical computing, which has, as of November 2010, undergone an upgrade to version 8. Other products include Wolfram SystemModeler, Wolfram Workbench, Mathematica Link for Excel,gridMathematica, and webMathematica.

The company launched Wolfram Alpha, an answer engine on 16 May 2009. It brings a new approach to knowledge generation and acquisition that involves large amounts of curated computable data in addition to semantic indexing of text.

Wolfram Research served as the mathematical consultant for the CBS television series Numb3rs, a show about the mathematical aspects of crime-solving.

Wolfram Research acquired MathCore Engineering AB on March 30, 2011.

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (/ˈdʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, designer and inventor. He is best known as the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he was widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields. Jobs also co-founded and served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar.

In the late 1970s, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak engineered one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa and, one year later, the Macintosh. During this period he also led efforts that would begin the desktop publishing revolution, notably through the introduction of the LaserWriter and the associated PageMaker software.

Stephen Wolfram (born 29 August 1959) is a British scientist and the chief designer of the Mathematica software application and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine.

Stephen Wolfram's parents were Jewish refugees who emigrated from Westphalia, Germany, to England in 1933. Wolfram's father Hugo was a textile manufacturer and novelist (Into a Neutral Country) and his mother Sybil was a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. He has a younger brother, Conrad.

Wolfram was educated at Eton, where he amazed and frustrated teachers by his brilliance and refusal to be taught, instead doing other students' math homework for money. Wolfram published an article on particle physics but claimed to be bored and left Eton prematurely in 1976. He entered St John's College, Oxford at age 17 but found lectures "awful". Working independently, Wolfram published a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 18 and nine other papers before leaving in 1978 without graduating. He received a Ph.D. in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology at age 20, joined the faculty there and received one of the first MacArthur awards in 1981, at age 21. According to Google Scholar Stephen Wolfram is cited by over 30,000 publications (up to April 2012) and has an h-index of 58.