Stephen Wolfram builds impossible things everyday—from inventing new programming languages to creating answer engines, like the one that powers Apple’s Siri.

In our latest episode of Formative, we explore how this master mathematician, theoretical physicist, and author of A New Kind of Science got his start.

Stephen was born in Oxford, England and learned to read using science books. By the age of 12, Stephen was publishing physics papers. After attending some highly competitive schools—including the English boarding school Eton—he went to the University of Oxford at 17, though he left shortly after to attend the California Institute of Technology.

The formative moment in Stephen’s career took place when he realized that he could use computers to study highly complex systems that would have required extremely laborious and complex math if done by hand. From there, Stephen developed the computer algebra system SMP (Symbolic Manipulation Program), followed by a more advanced computer algebra system, Mathematica, which he created after leaving Caltech to start his own company—Wolfram Alpha.

Since creating Wolfram Alpha, Stephen has developed several projects including a computational knowledge engine that is today used to power audio-based search engines such as Siri.