Assistant Research Programmer

About The Wolfram Institute

The Wolfram Institute for Computational Foundations of Science is a nonprofit research organization for the computational approach to fundamental science. Our goal is to develop research programs that are theoretically sound and computationally operable in areas including, but not limited to, physics, mathematics, philosophy/logic, biology, cognitive science/artificial intelligence and economics.

We are building on the technology stack developed by Wolfram Research in the last few decades and the intellectual legacy of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science and the Wolfram Physics Project.

Assistant Research Programmer

The Wolfram Institute is looking for Wolfram Language (Mathematica) programmers to help develop formal computational models to systematically answer foundational questions in biology, medicine, and machine learning.

Some questions our group, led by Stephen Wolfram, is currently studying:

Computationally Modeling of the Origin of Life - How did life originate on earth, and how could it originate elsewhere?

Biological Complexity - Can we formalize (computationally) Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the proliferation of complex forms in biology?

Computational Clinical Trials - What are, if any, the fundamental limitations to how well treatments can be tested in medicine?

Laws of Machine Learning - What ubiquitous features of machine learning exist and can we capture those with minimal computational models?

Evolutionary AI - Does the usefulness of recent iterative AI tools arise as a fundamental feature of computation?

For this role, your main responsibility will be to assist in the writing of Wolfram Language (Mathematica) to run and visualize computational experiments. This will involve exploring different parameter spaces, fine-tuning visualizations, and documenting and publishing relevant code.

Candidates with background in performance software engineering will also help develop optimized code in C/Rust/OpenCL to do more intense simulations with the computational models.

Mandatory skills:

Fluent Wolfram Language programmer with the ability to write clean, concise and efficient wolfram language code for the exploration and visualization of various computational models like cellular automata, Turing machines, etc.

An understanding and enthusiasm for the Wolfram approach to science (https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/)

Great skills to have:

Ability to write highly optimized code in C/Rust/OpenCL for exploring these computational models.

General interest and enthusiasm for scientific fields like biology, medicine, machine learning etc.

Ability to articulate complex results clearly and concisely