Matthew Cook (born February 7, 1970) is a mathematician and computer scientist who is best known for having proved

Stephen Wolfram Stephen Wolfram (; born 29 August 1959) is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Ma ...

's conjecture that the

Rule 110 The Rule 110 cellular automaton (often called simply Rule 110) is an elementary cellular automaton with interesting behavior on the boundary between stability and chaos. In this respect, it is similar to Conway's Game of Life. Like Life, Rule 110 ...

cellular automaton A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tessel ...

Turing-complete In computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules (such as a computer's instruction set, a programming language, or a cellular automaton) is said to be Turing-complete or computationally universal if it can be used to simulate any Tur ...

Biography

Cook was born in

Morgantown, West Virginia Morgantown is a city in and the county seat of Monongalia County, West Virginia, Monongalia County, West Virginia, United States, situated along the Monongahela River. The largest city in North-Central West Virginia, Morgantown is best known as th ...

and grew up in

Evanston, Illinois Evanston ( ) is a city, suburb of Chicago. Located in Cook County, Illinois, United States, it is situated on the North Shore along Lake Michigan. Evanston is north of Downtown Chicago, bordered by Chicago to the south, Skokie to the west, Wil ...

. He is an alumnus of the

Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics Hampshire (, ; abbreviated to Hants) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in western South East England on the coast of the English Channel. Home to two major English cities on its south coast, Southampton and Portsmouth, Hampshire is ...

program and completed his undergraduate studies at the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...

and the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program. In 1987, Cook qualified as a member of the six-person US team to the

International Mathematical Olympiad The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a mathematical olympiad for pre-university students, and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. The first IMO was held in Romania in 1959. It has since been held annually, except i ...

and won a bronze medal. In 1990, Cook went to work for

Wolfram Research Wolfram Research, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational company that creates computational technology. Wolfram's flagship product is the technical computing program Wolfram Mathematica, first released on June 23, 1988. Other products include Wo ...

, makers of the computer algebra system

Mathematica Wolfram Mathematica is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allow machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimizat ...

. He did his doctoral work in Computation and Neural Systems at

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

from 1999 to 2005. He is now at the Institute of

Neuroinformatics Neuroinformatics is the field that combines informatics and neuroscience. Neuroinformatics is related with neuroscience data and information processing by artificial neural networks. There are three main directions where neuroinformatics has to be ...

at Zurich in Switzerland.

Work with Stephen Wolfram

In the 1990s Cook worked as a research assistant to

, assisting with work on Wolfram's book, ''

A New Kind of Science ''A New Kind of Science'' is a book by Stephen Wolfram, published by his company Wolfram Research under the imprint Wolfram Media in 2002. It contains an empirical and systematic study of computational systems such as cellular automata. Wolfram c ...

''. Among other things, he developed a proof showing that the

cellular automaton is Turing-complete. Cook presented his proof at the

Santa Fe Institute The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, includ ...

conference CA98 before the publishing of Wolfram's book—an action that led Wolfram Research to accuse Cook of violating his

NDA NDA may stand for: Military * National Defence Academy (India), a military academy in India * National Defence Act, legislation for organizing and funding Canada's military * National Defense Academy of Japan, a military academy in Japan * Nig ...

and resulted in the blocking of the publication of the proof in the conference proceedings. ''A New Kind of Science'' was released in 2002 with an outline of the proof. In 2004, Cook published his proof in Wolfram's journal ''

Complex Systems A complex system is a system composed of many components which may interact with each other. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as power grid, transportation or communication s ...

''.

References

External links

Personal web siteSite at INI Zurich
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cook, Matthew 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians California Institute of Technology alumni Cellular automatists People from Evanston, Illinois 1970 births Living people International Mathematical Olympiad participants Mathematicians from Illinois