Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha (also styled WolframAlpha and Wolfram|Alpha) is a computational knowledge engine or answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from externally sourced "curated data", rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might.

Wolfram Alpha, which was released on May 18, 2009, is based on Wolfram's earlier flagship product Mathematica, a computational platform or toolkit that encompasses computer algebra, symbolic and numerical computation, visualization, and statistics capabilities. Additional data is gathered from both academic and commercial websites such as the CIA's The World Factbook, the United States Geological Survey, a Cornell University Library publication called All About Birds, Chambers Biographical Dictionary, Dow Jones, the Catalogue of Life,CrunchBase,Best Buy, the FAA and optionally a user's Facebook account.

Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram (born 29 August 1959) is a British scientist known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and in theoretical physics. He is the author of the book A New Kind of Science. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

He is the founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research where he worked as chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine. His recent work has been on knowledge-based programming, expanding and refining the programming language of Mathematica into what is now called the Wolfram Language. His book An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language appeared in 2015.

Early life

Stephen Wolfram was born in London in 1959 to Hugo and Sybil Wolfram.

Hugo Wolfram

Stephen's father, Hugo Wolfram (1925- in Bochum, Germany), a textile manufacturer, served as Managing Director of the Lurex Company, makers of the fabric Lurex and was also author of three novels. Hugo Wolfram was born in Germany, emigrating to England in 1933. When World War II broke out, young Hugo left school at 15 and subsequently found it hard to get a job since he was regarded an "enemy alien." As an adult, he took correspondence courses in philosophy and psychology.