Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People Stephen Wolfram: Physicist and Youngest MacArthur Award Winner
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Dec 18, 2019 
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Early Academic Unconventional Path
- Stephen Wolfram skipped degrees at Eton and Oxford but earned a Caltech PhD in particle physics at age 20.
- He won a MacArthur Fellowship at 21 and immediately focused on building computational tools for science.
Rolling The Cricket Ball
- Wolfram avoided sports with clever strategies and once rolled a cricket ball along the ground to get a batsman out.
- Teammates protested that his tactic was "not cricket," revealing cultural norms about fair play.
Teach Computational Thinking First
- Teach computational thinking as a core skill because it lets learners test ideas directly with a computer.
- Use computation to make abstract math concepts concrete and self-verifiable for students.