Conrad Wolfram

Conrad Wolfram is the younger Wolfram of Wolfram Research—they are who do Wolfram|Alpha, Demonstrations, and the core underlying technology—Mathematica. He founded the European Wolfram Research in 1991 after his brother Stephen set up the headquarters in the US. He continues to be its CEO.

Since 1997 Wolfram has also been strategic director of the worldwide group and initiates and directs their business, marketing, design, and a variety of strategic technical projects – everything from the CDF Player concept to webMathematica (which underlies Wolfram|Alpha) to conceptualizing wolfram.com. In doing this, he has formed new management concepts, including the early use of website design to define strategy, “strategic bundles,” and industry solutions sites as a way to verticalize activities.

A key part of his work has been understanding its technology’s underlying scope and communicating what they have, which he does in talks, sometimes in blogs, and often in directing their initiatives and their messages.

Conrad Wolfram is interested in how technology and computation can move our lives and economies forward and, in turn, how this affects education. In particular, he realized that maths’ school subject has become almost discrepant from its real-world application, and in 2010 founded computerbasedmath.org to address this worldwide.

This year, he released The Math(s) Fix: An Education Blueprint for the AI Age. It exposes why maths education is in crisis worldwide, and how the only fix is a fundamentally new mainstream subject—not only identifying the problem but also proposing a detailed solution and suggesting some of the ways we might get there.

He has an MA from Cambridge University, UK, where he read physics and mathematics.