Matthew Cook
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Matthew Cook (February 7, 1970 - ) is the mathematician and computer scientist who proved Stephen Wolfram's conjecture that the Rule 110 cellular automaton is Turing-complete. Rule 110 is an extremely simple system, and the fact that it is Turing-complete is remarkable -- it is arguably the simplest Turing-complete system currently known, as it yields the smallest known universal Turing machines.
Cook was born in Morgantown, West Virginia and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. His undergraduate studies were at the University of Illinois and the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program. In 1990, Cook went to work for Wolfram Research, makers of the computer algebra system Mathematica. In 1999, Cook went to Caltech for doctoral work in Computation and Neural Systems. He received his Ph.D. in 2005.
In the 1980s Cook excelled in mathematics, winning national competitions and qualifying as a member of the six-person US team to the International Mathematical Olympiad.
In the 1990s Cook worked as a research assistant to Stephen Wolfram, assisting with work on Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science. Among other things, he developed a proof showing that the Rule 110 cellular automaton is Turing-complete. Cook's proof of this fact, first conjectured by Wolfram in 1985, has been described as the main technical achievement in Wolfram's book.
Cook presented his proof at the Santa Fe Institute conference CA98. Wolfram Research alleged Cook was violating his NDA, since the book had not yet been published, and blocked the publication of his proof in the conference proceedings. A New Kind of Science was released in 2002 with an outline of the proof and in 2004, Cook published his proof in Wolfram's journal Complex Systems.