New York

FOR nearly three decades, Stephen Wolfram has built software technology that has attracted an avid following among mathematicians and scientists. His Mathematica program for symbolic mathematical computation and its programming language, Wolfram Language, are favourites of the intelligentsia of the quant world in universities and corporations.

Wolfram Alpha, his question-answer technology, is available on its own website and serves up many of the answers for Apple's voice-controlled digital assistant Siri. His approach to this artificial intelligence challenge was both innovative and idiosyncratic, and characteristic of Dr Wolfram, who earned his PhD in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology when he was 20 and soon after received a MacArthur "genius" award.