Personal Update & AMA (September 18, 2026)

Stephen Wolfram (0:01)

Hello, everyone. Well, I'm back to live streaming. So I last did one of these live streams about three months ago. I've been doing live streams like this for six years, and very few things take me away from live streaming. But I had a month of doing something good and then a disaster. So the month of doing something good was our annual summer programs for grownups and for high school students, where I get to make up, what was it this year, maybe 150 projects and see people do them, which is fun and exciting. Well, after that, the disaster. So the bottom line is my wife died suddenly at the end of July, and something where we've been together for 36 years. So a good fraction of my life, so to speak, and it was something very unexpected.

She had various kinds of medical issues right at the end and had heart surgery and all went fine, and all was good. And even the day she died, she had a great day and then suddenly disaster. And good way to die, except it should have been decades later. But so that is kind of I've been lucky enough to lead a life that has had no major tragedies in it until this one.

In any case, that has kept me away from live streaming and doing other things for a while. But now I suppose I'm back, and I thought I would kind of give a little bit of a personal update and talk a little bit about some of the things that I'm interested in these days and so on. It's been a...

I mean, my wife, Elise, was kind of with me through many, many things and many projects. I mean, we met a couple of years after version one of Mathematica came out. So it was in 1990 So that meant she knew what she was getting. I was already tech CEO-ing and doing most of the things I do today, perhaps not as energetically on some of them, but it was kind of the path of my life was somewhat determined. And then in the 1990s, she lived through the decade when I was working on New Kind of Science, and Wolfram Alpha, and in more recent years, the physics project and the things that have come from that. I have to say that I've talked about many things on live streams. I have tended to not talk about my family and so on in these kinds of settings.

But when Elise died, I decided I should write a memorial piece about her, which kind of has all the details.

And I have to say it was cathartic for me to do that. It's disappointing to realize what one's lost, but somehow it felt good to be able to kind of describe what was there. And that I started writing it a day after she died. And I think that was kind of the idea. I've written many things in my life. That was the one written under the most duress of anything I've written. So, I was pleased to discover that I could still write even under those circumstances.

I think, let's see.

Boy, Sandy is asking, what's it like to put 36 years of memories into one piece of writing? I don't know. It was not so hard to write. It kind of tumbled out.

It helped that my younger daughter, Elizabeth, helped me with it. Actually, we realized that her writing style is quite compatible with mine. So, she was often able to say, maybe the sentence should end this way. And I was like, yeah, I was thinking of that. Apparently, Elise had told her at some point in the past that Elizabeth's writing style is quite compatible with mine, to which my response to Elizabeth was, how would she know Elise never read anything I wrote? Which Elizabeth said isn't the case, and I know isn't strictly the case. But Elise and I had a life in common, but did not do projects together.

I think I would attribute that to the fact that she was very strong-willed and intellectually forceful. One can form one's own opinion about whether those descriptions would also apply to me. But it tended to be the case that projects were not something we could collaborate on, other than our lives and our children.

25 years ago, we built some, we built, she built a big house in Concord, Massachusetts. And at the beginning of that process, I was like making suggestions about the plans. And she's like, no, no, no, that's nonsense. That's a bad idea. So I quickly realized that this was a, this is a one-person project, not a couple collaborative project.