Company Background: Wolfram Research, Inc.

Through innovation and progressive growth, Wolfram Research, Inc. continues to thrive as the world's leading technical software company. Wolfram Research products maintain a reputation for innovation, power, quality, and elegance. The company's aim can be summarized: "Pushing the Envelope of Technical Computing."

While remaining privately held, Wolfram Research has been continuously profitable, and it has thus been able to fund unusually long-term R&D projects and to port Mathematica, its flagship product, to a wide selection of operating systems.

The Wolfram Group consists of four companies: Wolfram Research, Inc. and Wolfram Media, Inc. in the United States, Wolfram Research Europe Ltd. in the United Kingdom, and Wolfram Research Asia Ltd. in Japan. The UK office coordinates the sales, marketing, and support of all European distributors and customers, and the office in Japan is a direct sales and marketing liaison to distributors and resellers.

The Wolfram Group has employees in research and development, marketing, sales, support, and customer service. An Executive Committee of six long-serving Wolfram Research members, representing each division of the Group, reports to the president and CEO, Stephen Wolfram. The creator of Mathematica, Wolfram maintains close involvement with the development of Mathematica and the overall design of its new features.

Company Character

Wolfram Research's leadership in technical computing stems from its ability to set the direction for new technology. The Wolfram Group is characterized by an individualist approach, a "no compromises" attitude to design, the welcoming of innovation, a deep respect for the Mathematica user base and users' suggestions, and the constant search for good general approaches rather than quick fixes or purely cosmetic solutions. Management fosters a lively, informal atmosphere with a flat organizational structure more like a research department than a typical company and recruits from a wide range of backgrounds. The selection of candidates to join the company is decided more by raw ability than by traditional qualifications in that field.

Special Programs

Wolfram Research sponsors both the academic and the corporate communities with direct contributions to education-related programs and scientific research. These programs range from the Mathematica Academic Grant Programs, which award grants to select academic institutions and educators showing outstanding creative promise in using Mathematica to enhance their education and research activities, to the Mathematica Author and Publisher Program, which provides support and tools for authors and publishers of Mathematica-related books. The Student Intern Program recruits talented students who would like to gain real-world experience and offers internships in all departments of the company each summer.

History

Stephen Wolfram, the founder of Wolfram Research, is widely regarded as the most important innovator in technical computing today. A distinguished scientist particularly known for his fundamental discoveries in complex systems research, Wolfram has been a leading user and developer of tools for scientific and technical computing for over 20 years. In 1987, Wolfram founded Wolfram Research to provide an organizational environment in which software of the highest quality could be produced and distributed.

Mathematica Version 1.0 was released on June 23, 1988, and was immediately lauded by the scientific and technical community, as well as the media, as a dramatic advance. Within months, there were tens of thousands of users around the world, and today Mathematica's reach continues to grow to well over a million.

Mathematica has been adopted in an unprecedented range of fields both in industry and in academia. In fact, Mathematica has been responsible for bringing advanced mathematics and computing to fields that were traditionally less technical, and in so doing it has substantially increased the market for technical software in general. A growing industry of applications, consulting services, books, and courseware serves the international community of Mathematica users.

As Wolfram Research continues to grow and as Mathematica's use continues to expand into a variety of fields, Mathematica's influence will be seen in the products of the future, in significant research findings, and in classrooms worldwide.