Wolfram Research
More info
- Creator
- Stephen Wolfram
- Released
- Type
- Software company
- Website
- wolfram.com
Stephen Wolfram's privately held company behind Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and a programming language named after its founder.
Physicist Stephen Wolfram started the company in Champaign, Illinois, in 1987 and shipped Mathematica the following year. It did symbolic maths – differentiating and simplifying expressions rather than just printing decimals – and its notebook interface, mixing code, output and prose in one document, beat Jupyter to the idea by a quarter of a century.
Wolfram|Alpha launched in 2009 as a "computational knowledge engine" that answers questions instead of listing links, and for a while supplied answers behind Siri. The language underneath was rebranded Wolfram Language in 2013. The company has never gone public, which goes some way to explaining why nearly every product carries the founder's surname.