Group Abstract Group Abstract

Message Boards Message Boards

9
|
318 Views
|
3 Replies
|
21 Total Likes
View groups...
Share
Share this post:

[CALL] Ignite the Future: Help Us Find the Next Generation of Wolfram Innovators

EDITORIAL BOARD, WOLFRAM
Posted 9 days ago

Ignite the Future: Help Us Find the Next Generation of Wolfram Innovators

For well over a decade, the Wolfram Innovator Award has honored pioneering uses of computation across disciplines—from breakthroughs in quantum computing and artificial intelligence to advances in biomedical research, environmental modeling, algorithmic art, and computational education. These awards have celebrated individuals who use Wolfram technologies to push boundaries in science, industry, and creative practice. Now, it's time to extend that spotlight to the next generation.

enter image description here

We're looking to celebrate exceptional computational thinking by creators early in their careers - from outstanding students to junior researchers to young entrepreneurs—many of whom we've likely not even been introduced to yet. Let's fix that, together.

Students, research assistants and young entrepreneurs around the world are using Wolfram technologies in countless creative ways from modeling and discovery to building tools, products, visualizations, and learning experiences. Many are also helping grow local communities through outreach, mentorship, and education often supported by programs like the Wolfram Student Ambassador Program. The possibilities are as diverse as the students themselves. It's time we recognized this brilliance.

We'd love to hear about and honor originality, clarity of thought, and impactful use of Wolfram-powered computation whether through essays, visualizations, simulations, learning tools, data projects, or something entirely unexpected.

Ways You Can Contribute

Spotlight an emerging leader

Tell us about someone you know, someone you've worked with, a student or collaborator that made you think "this young person is going to win a Wolfram Innovator Award someday". Who impressed you with a Wolfram-based project? Share their name, age, and a brief project description or link.

Showcase an Outstanding Project

Post examples (with links or screenshots) of brilliant youth work using Wolfram tools—your own work or one you admire.

Suggest a Category

Beyond "science" and "coding": What kinds of youth innovation should we celebrate? Computational art? Educational tools? Social impact? Data storytelling? Drop your category ideas.

Spot Talent from the Field

Browse past projects from our summer programs or from the Student Leadership Programs, and nominate ones that deserve wider recognition.

Drop a Wild Idea

Share an unconventional concept for how this award could work or evolve. No limits just original thinking.

Even small personal projects that solve real problems or communicate a concept beautifully can be celebrated. Help us discover them!

Add your thoughts, projects, nominations, and ideas in the comments - and let's all take time to recognize the future innovators that are doing things today!
POSTED BY: EDITORIAL BOARD
3 Replies
Sort By:

I would like to nominate Eric Buehler in the category "Spot Talent from the Field". His WSRP 2025 project "Training and exploring the inner workings of discrete neural networks" -- for which I was a mentor -- has the goal to "reverse engineer" Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) by using discrete mathematics. (Instead of the traditional ANN back-propagation continuous mathematics.)

The project started with the motivation and theoretical background of Stephen Wolfram's work "What’s Really Going On in Machine Learning? Some Minimal Models". Eric developed a package extending the original code, and designed, staged, and conducted different discrete-ANN experiments. (Based on hexagonal cellular automata.) For those experiments he utilized different optimization algorithms (simulated annealing being the winner) and programmed the orchestration of parallel executions of the experiments.

The reported results are very promising -- ANN over certain data can be done using discrete mathematics. Extensions of Eric's work would be of great interest!
POSTED BY: Anton Antonov
Austin Jiang
Austin Jiang
Posted 4 days ago

My name is Austin Jiang. I am nominating myself. I participated in the Wolfram High School Summer Research Program 2024 and the Wolfram Emerging Leaders Program HS 2024–2025. I also served as a student ambassador. In 2025, I was a teaching assistant for the Wolfram High School Summer Research Program and registered for the Wolfram Emerging Leaders Program U 2025–2026.

I am passionate about computer science, from theoretical computer science to computing olympiads, from creative computation to hackathons. In WSRP 2024, my research focused on constructing bitwise operators using SK combinators. This was not the original project assigned to me, but an idea that came to me after finishing my initial combinator task. I developed a new way to represent binary numbers using recursive nested pairs in SK combinators, which allowed me to define bitwise operations at the level of individual bits. I also built a direct two-way translation between this numeral structure and Church numerals using SK combinators. This made it possible to apply bitwise operators directly to Church numerals. Project link: https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/3216997

I have continued this research over the past year. I applied Y combinators and Church numeral recursion to generalize bitwise operators to variable-length inputs within the combinator system itself. This work has strong theoretical value because SK combinators are equivalent to the lambda calculus. My structure allows Church numerals to support arbitrary map-depth and function composition in the lambda calculus. The research link is https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/3520635.

When I was a teaching assistant at WSRP 2025, Stephen Wolfram signed my book with a handwritten message: “21st Century λ Combinator-ist.” enter image description here I believe everything I accomplished was only possible because of the function repository in Wolfram Language. It allowed me to compile and evaluate SK combinators and lambda expressions without manually computing the entire structure, which would otherwise be intractable. This may explain why this area has very little prior research. I also contributed to the Wolfram Function Repository with my own function: https://resources.wolframcloud.com/FunctionRepository/resources/BinaryCombinator

In the Wolfram Emerging Leaders Program 2024–2025, I took a completely different project. I created a 3D printing infill generator using 3D cellular automata. Project link: https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/3379925. While this lacks some sort of theoretical depth, it shows my application of Wolfram Language practically, innovatively, and creatively.

All of this connects to my deep interest in algorithms. As a two-time national top 10 finalist in the Canadian Computing Olympiad, I view algorithms not just as problem-solving tools but as creative structures. In a recent national hackathon, I designed a new memory modeling algorithm that simulates human knowledge for personalized learning and memory planning.

With Wolfram Language, I can make everything true.
POSTED BY: Austin Jiang

I would like to nominate Aaditya Bilakanti whom it was my pleasure to mentor in WSRP 2025 for his project On functional trees which was based (as are many projects) on a note in New Kind of Science. The basic idea is relat9ively simple, to see how many different numbers can be obtained by fixing a function of two integer variables, f, and constructing arbitrary binary trees and giving the value 1 to each leaf node and assigning to each interior node, the value of applying f to the value of its children. I suggested generalizations such as measuring the growth rate of the number of solutions as a function of the number of leaves in a tree. In the end, he produced many interesting theor3etical results and even gave a proof of a conjecture in the original note. We came close but did not quite complete a proof that the question as to whether a particular value can occur is most likely undecidable. Other interesting results included producing a function f such that every different binary tree led to a different answer and with further refinement showing a function where every binary tree produced a different answer and which took as values all possible positive integers (thus achieving the theoretical upper bound on the number of results for a given number of leaves).
POSTED BY: Lyman Hurd
Reply to this discussion
Community posts can be styled and formatted using the Markdown syntax.
Tag limit exceeded
Note: Only the first five people you tag will receive an email notification; the other tagged names will appear as links to their profiles.
Reply Preview
Attachments
Remove
or Discard