MathWorld Headline News

A New Kind of Science in Stores May 14

May 6, 2002--After more than a decade of writing and two decades of research and discovery, noted scientist and Mathematica creator Stephen Wolfram has announced the completion of his long-anticipated book A New Kind of Science.

This 1197-page book constructs a new way of looking at the operation of the natural world in terms of the behavior of sets of rules that can be embodied in simple computer programs. This paradigm represents a new abstract system for understanding such diverse disciplines as mathematics, physics, biology, social science, computer science, philosophy, art, and technology in terms of general rules of essentially any type.

A New Kind of Science uses computation as a means for understanding both the natural world and abstract mathematical systems. In particular, it extends Wolfram's early insights gained from investigations into the basic behaviors of cellular automata (an area that had only very modest activity prior to Wolfram's work and that then became a significant focal point for earlier attempts to understand complexity). In his book, Wolfram implements and describes simple and elegant rule-based computations written almost exclusively in Mathematica, the technical computing system that Wolfram created partly as the research tool he needed to accelerate work on his new science.

In a distinctive and direct style aimed at both lay readers and scientific professionals, Wolfram presents the fundamental new principles that govern phenomena from the origin of complexity in biology to the possibility of a truly fundamental unified theory of physics. Chief among these is his Principle of Computational Equivalence, a principle that Wolfram uses to derive an unprecedented array of implications for science and scientific thinking.

The book contains hundreds of beautiful illustrations created with Mathematica. These illustrations are an essential element of Wolfram's presentation and method of discovery. The book also features an extensive set of historical and technical notes containing the Mathematica code that Wolfram used for his investigations and serving to present a number of additional discoveries.

A New Kind of Science will be available in stores on May 14. With its release, Wolfram hopes to share and communicate his discoveries with as wide a range of scientists and nonscientists as possible and also to interest others in undertaking additional investigations that follow his fundamental, new results. Initiatives to support further investigations of Wolfram's work will be announced over time on the book's website www.wolframscience.com.

Wolfram Research also plans to release a software supplement to the book called A New Kind of Science Explorer. This affordably priced product uses the technology that also powers Mathematica. It is designed to give the user the ability to reproduce many of Wolfram's experiments in their original form and move on to investigate almost limitless variations. Its user interface requires no programming experience, and it will be released soon after the book's debut.