ITHACA, N.Y. -- Revolutionary scientific thinker Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, a leading software system for technical computing and symbolic programming, and chief executive of Wolfram Research Inc., will present a lecture Wednesday, Oct. 2, on the Cornell University campus.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be in David L. Call Alumni Auditorium of Kennedy Hall at 7:30 p.m., with a question period scheduled for 8:30.

Wolfram will describe ideas and discoveries from his book published in May of this year, A New Kind of Science , their implications for various fields of science, and their personal and historical context. The book claims to have discovered rules for the complexity of the natural world.

Wolfram, who won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award in 1981 at the age of 21, has spent more than 20 years developing a new approach to science, based on the idea of studying not traditional mathematical equations but, instead, rules such as those embodied in the simplest computer programs, called cellular automata. A key discovery is that such rules can lead to behavior that shows immense complexity and that mirrors many features seen in nature. Wolfram has built on this to tackle an array of fundamental problems in science, including the origins of apparent randomness in physical systems, the development of complexity in biology, the ultimate scope and limitations of mathematics, the possibility of a truly fundamental theory of physics, the interplay between free will and determinism, and the character of intelligence in the universe.

He was educated in England at Eton College and the University of Oxford, and in the United States at the California Institute of Technology, where he earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1979 at the age of 20. He founded Wolfram Research in 1986.

In the early 1980s, he made a series of discoveries about cellular automata, leading to numerous applications in physics, mathematics, computer science, biology and other fields.