[jeegsy]

> He sued one of his employees to prevent him (the employee) from publishing a proof that Wolfram claimed he had discovered in his book.

The wikipedia article claims that Wolfram conjectured rule 110 in 1985 many years before Cook. Out of curiosity, do you have any info that disputes this?

[mnemonicsloth]

I've read Wolfram's Wikipedia page. It doesn't contain a single word about the controversy that surrounds him and that is in evidence in this discussion thread. On the page for his book, A New Kind of Science, all the allegations of academic dishonesty, which to working scientists is probably more important than the contents of his work -- assigning credit for discoveries is how they get paid, after all -- has been compressed down to a single paragraph at the very end. And that paragraph contradicts itself on a sentence-by-sentence basis, first blaming Wolfram, then excusing him, then blaming him again and so on. So it seems that someone has been pretty successful -- more successful than not -- at erasing criticism of Wolfram from his Wikipedia presence. Therefore, I think Wikipedia's claim that he invented rule 110 in 1985 is highly suspect.

That doesn't matter much, though. Academics have a lot of ways to deal with priority disputes. Sometimes they author a paper together. Sometimes they each publish separately in the same issue of one journal. That's what happened when Darwin and Wallis simultaneously developed the theory of evolution. Sometimes, if the first discoverer was much earlier than the second, the second author might publish the work, and make a public statement in the paper saying the first author was first. This is what happened when Claude Shannon invented information theory only to learn that Norbert Wiener had done the same thing twenty years before. If Wolfram had documentation of his claim, some compromise could probably have been worked out.

Instead, it's a matter of public record that he sued Cook, alleging that the knowledge that Cook had done the work was a trade secret of Wolfram Research. I said before that scientists get paid by correctly being assigned credit for their discoveries. Suing to prevent a scientist from taking credit for their research is like armed robbery. There had been some grumbling before, but this was the moment when scientists recognized that Stephen Wolfram was Not A Real Scientist Anymore.