Stephen Wolfram - Agenda Setters 2009

Name: Stephen Wolfram

Title: Creator of the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine

Position: 29    Last year: Not ranked

Why? For expanding the horizons of search engines

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• Dr Robert Atkinson
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• Martha Lane Fox

Professor Stephen Wolfram hit the headlines earlier this year by creating a new kind of search engine called Wolfram Alpha.

His none too modest ambition for Wolfram Alpha is that it will be used to "delve into all the knowledge in the world" and calculate new information.

The search engine goes far beyond Google, type in a genetic code and it will tell you what strand of DNA it is situated on and what we know about it.

What distinguishes Wolfram's creation from its competitors is its ability to answer questions that have not yet been worked out online. For instance it could tell you how many Nobel Prize winners were born under a full moon without someone having worked it out before.

But Wolfram should not be seen as an overnight success, he is a 50-year-old former particle physics prodigy who has spent his life trying to unlock the potential of computers.

His "computational knowledge engine" builds upon his earlier work, which includes writing the powerful computational software program Mathematica and building a company around it called Wolfram Research, and writing the book A New Kind of Science that claims to redefine the universe in terms of computation.

Wolfram's ideals are ambitious enough for the panel to elevate him to the top table of geekdom, with one panellist saying: "If the geeks shall inherit the earth, Stephen Wolfram will lead them". One to look out for then.