However his interests were not restricted to physics; he also dabbled in mathematics and in computers.
As a twenty year old with a Ph.D. in physics from CalTech, Wolfram was destined to leave his mark on the world of science. In 1980 he became the youngest person to receive a MacArthur fellowship--the so-called "genius grant"--that enabled him to work full-time pursuing advances in mathematics and computer science. One of the results was the Symbolic Manipulation Program, which could assist mathematics programs on the computer. Wolfram wanted to sell this program, but CalTech argued that they owned it since the scientist had done his work while in their employ. The courts agreed, awarding the program to the university, and Wolfram left in 1982, going first to the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and then on to a professorship in physics, math, and computer science at the University of Illinois at Champaign, where he was also director of the Center for Complex Systems Research. By this time, Wolfram's research had increasingly focused on cellular automata, a theoretical model to describe how complex systems grow out of simple component parts. These studies led to many influential papers and the 1986 publication Theory and Applications of Cellular Automata.
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