Historically, education had to emphasize hand calculations, says John Dixon, a program manager at Wolfram Research.
Five years after receiving his MacArthur Fellowship, Wolfram began developing Mathematica, and in 1988 Wolfram Research announced the release of its flagship product.Īlan Joyce, the director of content development for Wolfram Alpha, says that cheating is “absolutely the wrong way to look at what we do.” But the staff understands what might make teachers uncomfortable. Wolfram became obsessed with complex systems and how computers could be used to study them. Yet the tool that helped Wolfram build his reputation with physics ended up pulling him away from science. In 1981, Wolfram became the youngest person to ever receive a MacArthur Fellowship. By programming it to solve equations and find patterns in data, he could leave the math to the machine and focus his brain on the science. His solution was to get his hands on a computer. He could come up with concepts, but executing calculations was hard.
By 12, he’d written a dictionary on physics, by his early teens he’d churned out three (as yet unpublished) books, and by 15 he was publishing scientific papers.ĭespite his wunderkind science abilities, math was a constant stumbling block. Growing up, Wolfram’s obsession was physics. Indeed, the inspiration for Wolfram|Alpha, which he released in 2009, started with Wolfram’s own struggles as a math student. Stephen Wolfram, the mind behind Wolfram|Alpha, can’t do long division and didn’t learn his times tables until he’d hit 40.
They say that Wolfram|Alpha is the future. What some call cheating, others have heralded as a massive step forward in how we learn, what we teach, and what education is even good for.
Though Wolfram|Alpha was designed to be an educational asset - a way to explore an equation from within- academia has found itself at a loss over how to respond.
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