One Man’s Answer

Wolfram's involvement in and of itself has generated plenty of hype, because of his reputation for disrupting the status quo. The London-born physicist's first hit came in 1988 with Mathematica, a program that did for complex calculations what Microsoft Word did for writing: provided a powerful but simple-to-use tool that quickly became an industry standard. With a few lines of Mathematica code, Boeing engineers could model the flow of air over an experimental airplane wing. Mathematica now has 2 million users and has made Wolfram fantastically wealthy. (Wolfram Research, the parent company behind both Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica, is still private and brings in an estimated $22 million a year.)

In some ways, Wolfram|Alpha is the next logical step. With Alpha, Wolfram is bringing the computing power and data of Mathematica to a more general audience. "We're bringing expert-level knowledge to everybody," he says of Alpha.

The money he made with Mathematica gave Wolfram the freedom to tackle his next major project: reinventing science. It was about as humble an undertaking as it sounds. He obsessed over the idea that extremely complex and seemingly random events, including weather patterns and the way a zebra's stripes form, actually stem from a few, simple rules. The result of his 10-year odyssey was A New Kind of Science, a 1,200-page brick of a book that Wolfram self-published. The reception was generally lukewarm. The Nobel Prize–-winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote that "the strongest reaction I have seen by scientists to this new book has been outrage at Wolfram's exaggeration of the importance of his own contributions."

It follows, then, that Wolfram is not humble about his creations, and Wolfram|Alpha is no exception. Given the technical nature of most of Alpha's data, it would be reasonable to expect that most of its users would be professional scientists, engineers and the like. But Wolfram dismissed that idea. When asked who he envisioned using it, he seemed almost frustrated by the question. "People," he said. "Out there. All kinds of people." Then, purposefully or not, he compared it to Google: "Just like people have gotten used to the idea that there's the Web out there, and we can go and search for things on it, people will get used to the idea that there's Wolfram|Alpha out there and we can go compute things on it."

Google won't say what it thinks of Alpha, but there are signs that it's watching closely. In the past, Google has made a few halfhearted attempts to give users hard-and-fast answers, as Alpha does. Most recently, Google integrated public government data into its results, so now when someone searches for "unemployment rate" they receive a custom-made graph and the latest figures. But Google chose an interesting time to announce the feature: the same hour that Wolfram gave the first public demonstration of Alpha, at Harvard Law School in late April. "My guess is that Google or Microsoft may do deals with Alpha," says Spivack. "With a service like Alpha behind it, [Google] could do much more sophisticated calculations." Google, of course, has 20,000 employees and $18 billion in cash—it could simply decide to build its own Alpha. As Spivack puts it, "Alpha may not be a Google-killer, but Google could be an Alpha-killer."

That might not give quite enough credit to Wolfram, who is not only a hyper-intelli-gent scientist but an extraordinarily successful businessman. When asked how he plans to make money off Alpha, he rattles off a half dozen plausible options, from corporate sponsorship to consulting. "We've been building a core technology," says Wolfram, "I think there'll be lots of interesting partnering."

That would make Wolfram even more wealthy than he is now, but he says that's not what drives him. "My main reason for doing it is, that, well, I was curious whether it was possible," he said. "But also, I think it's useful, and I like doing things that are useful." Doing something that is merely "useful" may not sound visionary, but then again, branding has never been one of Wolfram's strong points.

© 2009