Stephen Wolfram is one of the most amazing people of our time.

He is known to the lay person, if at all, for a program called Mathematica, which has done as much for the acceleration of change as Moore's Law itself.

By boiling down what you can do with mathematics into a computer program, Mathematica freed science from waiting on mathematics to analyze data. The program helps you devise formulae that work, so the results you get are proven. When people would say "it's not rocket science" they were often referring to the combination of math and science required to launch a rocket. Now, thanks to Wolfram, even rocket science isn't rocket science anymore.

Not only that, but Mathematica made Wolfram's Wolfram Research a going concern, a real business. It freed him from the demands of academe. He truly became the elephant that could tap dance. (He's no Gates, but he's pretty good at it.)

Still, as they always say, what have you done for me lately?

Something quite amazing, actually.

A New Kind of Science is not just an intelligent book, and it's not just a computer program. It's an entirely new way of conceiving the world, something we haven't had since the first computer program, perhaps since mathematics itself.

As the preface to his book makes clear, Wolfram this time has amazed even himself.

Just as complex computer programs can be built from simple ones, so can complex experiments. In A New Kind of Science Wolfram offers this "language" of the computer-math connection in a way that cannot just be understood, but used, as his Mathematica program is used. It can be used by you in ways he never envisaged, just as any computer tool can be.

Building on the book, and the program, is Wolfram's Atlas (still in production as this is written), where you (and people like you) will be able to explore the concepts, and share the results, as you would any other computer program.

The result is, simply, breathtaking.

If you think of math as the machine language of discovery, and algebra as the Assembly Language of discovery, this is the 4G language. And it works all the way back, just as the Rosetta Stone gives us Egyptian next to Greek.

A lot of us grew up with pictures of Albert Einstein on our walls. Our grandchildren, if they are fortunate, will grow up with pictures of Stephen Wolfram. (And, as I am fond of noting in the case of high foreheads, he's also an exceedingly handsome man. Hey, grass don't grow on a busy street, kid.)