Stephen Wolfram is, strictly speaking, a high school and college dropout: He left both Eton and Oxford early, citing boredom. At 20, he received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Caltech and then joined the faculty in 1979. But he eventually moved away from academia, focusing instead on building a series of popular, powerful, and often eponymous research tools: Mathematica, WolframAlpha, and the Wolfram Language. He self-published a 1,200-page work called A New Kind of Science arguing that nature runs on ultrasimple computational rules. The book enjoyed surprising popular acclaim.
