Wolfram was born in London in 1959. His father ran an import-export business and wrote novels on the side. His mother was an Oxford philosopher. "I was viewed as a hopeless, crazy child," he says. "My parents concluded that I was 'impossibly psychologically confused and would never get anywhere in life.'" He wrote his first two scientific papers with no help except what he could find in the Eton library and popular science journals. Without bothering to graduate, Wolfram moved on to Oxford and became acquainted, for the first time, with "real scientist types." He entered the university just after his 17th birthday. "The first day I got to my first-year lectures and decided they were really awful," he says. "So I went to third-year lectures, and I found those pretty boring too." He left Oxford, once again without a diploma, and enrolled for graduate studies at Caltech, which had recruited him on the strength of his publications and his burgeoning reputation.
In Pasadena, Wolfram worked with some of the best physicists in the world. Once again, he decided he was wasting his time and made motions to move on. "But we tricked him, so to speak," says Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann, who helped to bring Wolfram west. "We gave him a Ph.D." Wolfram was barely 20. The Caltech physicists also awarded him a senior research position to help keep him around. It didn't. Neither did the MacArthur Fellowship, which came at that time and paid him $128,000 over five years.
Wolfram simply didn't seem interested in doing what he was expected to do. What had impressed Gell-Mann, Feynman, and most other physicists--at least those whom Wolfram hadn't totally antagonized--was the range of subjects he penetrated with alacrity: high-energy physics, mathematics, cosmology, computing, even artificial intelligence. But they would have preferred him to stick to physics. "Most students are very, very impressed with the beauty and fundamental character of elementary particle physics," says Gell-Mann. "Stephen has a different kind of taste."
