Born in 1959 in London, England, Wolfram came from a family of achievers. His father, Hugo Wolfram, ran an import-export business and was also a novelist, while his mother was a philosophy professor at Oxford University. Early on, Wolfram's own exceptional intellectual abilities became evident: unable to do simple arithmetic problems, he could, however, delve into higher math. Attending Eton, England's most elite private school, Wolfram, at age fifteen, published his first academic paper, one dealing with particle physics, which was accepted by a physics journal. He left Eton the following year without graduating and entered Oxford University. He was not stimulated by lectures at that institution but instead continued to do independent research in physics, and was taken on as a research assistant at Oxford's Rutherford Laboratory when he was only seventeen.
Wolfram did not bother graduating from Oxford, either. Instead he traveled to the United States in 1978 as a physics researcher at the Argonne National Laboratories. His move to the United States became permanent when he went to the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) on the strength of his published research papers and earned his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1979, essentially on the basis of six publications.
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