A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram: Monster Raving Egomania

Wolfram Research’s lawyers threatened a lawsuit over a citation to a claimed trade-secret proof, prompting the paper’s authors to replace the reference. The author contends that *A New Kind of Science* shows Wolfram’s shift from early brilliance to crankery, and outlines cellular automata history—from von Neumann’s self-replicating machines, through Conway’s Game of Life, to the 1980s revival that introduced rule numbers such as 18, 22, 90, and 110 in Wolfram’s 1983 “Statistical Mechanics of Cellular Automata.”