The most important precedents deal with the whole idea of symbolic programming - the notion of setting up symbolic expressions that can represent anything one wants, and then having functions that operate on both their structure and content.

The application programming interface (API) allows other applications to extend and enhance Alpha. He produced a series of papers systematically investigating the class of elementary cellular automata conceiving the Wolfram code a naming system for one-dimensional cellular automata and a classification scheme for the complexity of their behavior. SMP was further developed and marketed commercially by Inference Corp.

Stephen Wolfram (born 29 August 1959) is a British scientist and the chief designer of the Mathematica software application and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine.