Wolfram, Steven - Who is He?

I venture to say most chemists know what wolfram is; however, for the rest of us, wolfram is a heavy grey-white metallic element found in several ores-including wolframite and scheelite. But, who is Steven Wolfram? The only reason I'm suddenly interested in him is because of an excellent article I read by Donna Porter, and found here, about his possible Google-killing, or at the least, Google-crippling invention.

I scooted on over to WolframAlpha.com, his invention, and punched in "Who is Wolfram?" And the "input," that would be query or the question I asked, returned me an "input interpretation," or what we commonly refer to these days as a query result, with the option to explore two more results. The first of the three answers said "assuming Wolfram is a person," and is who was elaborated about on the page that came up after asking the question.. The second answer, which wasn't spoken about on the page though I could choose the option, was "use as a chemical element instead." The third option was "use as a (stand alone) word." Note the artificial intelligence displayed in the answer, if you will, in that I asked who and not what is Wolfram. Just for kicks, I went on to ask "what is wolfram?" Seems it needs a little work differentiating pronouns, since the three options came back in the same order when I had asked "who was..."

So, why all of this detail about what I did, how I did what I did, and what was the result of doing what I did? Contained in the written details above about Wolfram Alpha is how Steven Wolfram is going to be remembered. To quote the aforementioned writer, " Wolfram Alpha, in short, possesses the ability to understand natural language queries (questions) and provide real-time answers."

People not in-the-know are going to have all sorts of trouble remembering an odd name like WolframAlpha, and almost assuredly will slow its rise in popularity among the public-at-large; yet, this sharpest of cutting edge technology unflailingly is going to sickle a big spot for itself out of all of the good-for-nothing weeds that have cropped up throughout the Internet. Why he didn't just name the technology or site something more easily remembered, such as Wolf Ram, Wolfman, or Wolfpack is beyond me; other than, it's obvious the desire to have his proper last name attached to it was stronger than all other considerations, even if there were other considerations.

Ok, WolframAlpha.com tells us that Stephen Wolfram is a scientist. He was born in London, United Kingdom on August 29, 1959, presently making him 49 years old. That's it; no more than very basic information did WolframAlpha recount to me. There was two sidebars or boxes: related links, and search the web. The related links box had one link for Stephen Wolfram in it to...wait for it...wait for it, Wikipedia-go figure! The search the web box simply repeated the same question I'd asked, "who is wolfram?"