Editing Matthew Cook

{{short description|American mathematician}}
{{Other people}}
'''Matthew Cook''' (born February 7, 1970) is a mathematician and computer scientist who is best known for having proved [[Stephen Wolfram]]'s conjecture that the [[Rule 110]] [[cellular automaton]] is [[Turing completeness|Turing-complete]].

==Biography==
Cook was born in [[Morgantown, West Virginia]] and grew up in [[Evanston, Illinois]]. He completed his undergraduate studies at the [[University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign|University of Illinois]] and the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program. In 1987, Cook qualified as a member of the six-person US team to the [[International Mathematical Olympiad]] and won a bronze medal. In 1990, Cook went to work for [[Wolfram Research]], makers of the computer algebra system [[Mathematica]]. He did his  doctoral work in Computation and Neural Systems at [[California Institute of Technology|Caltech]] from 1999 to 2005. He is now at the Institute of [[Neuroinformatics]] at Zurich in Switzerland.

==Work with Stephen Wolfram==
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 presented his proof at the [[Santa Fe Institute]] conference CA98 before the publishing of Wolfram's book&mdash;an action that led Wolfram Research to accuse Cook of violating his [[Non-disclosure agreement|NDA]] and resulted in the blocking of the publication of the proof in the conference proceedings.
<ref>{{Cite journal
| last1 = Martinez
| first1 = Genaro J.
| last2 = Seck Tuoh Mora
| first2 = Juan
| last3 = Chapa
| first3 = Sergio
| last4 = Lemaitre
| first4 = Christian
| date = April 2019
| pages = 185–192
| title = Brief notes and history computing in Mexico during 50 years
| journal = International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems
| volume = 35
| issue = 2
| doi = 10.1080/17445760.2019.1608990
| access-date = 2020-04-15
| url = https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332634058
| arxiv = 1905.07527
| s2cid = 150262966
}}</ref>

''A New Kind of Science'' was released in 2002 with an outline of the proof. In 2004, Cook published his proof in Wolfram's journal ''[[Complex Systems (journal)|Complex Systems]]''.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Cook |first=Matthew |year=2004 |title=Universality in Elementary Cellular Automata |url=https://www.complex-systems.com/abstracts/v15_i01_a01/ |url-status=live |journal=Complex Systems |volume=15 |pages=1–40 |doi=10.25088/ComplexSystems.15.1.1 |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20160528014857/http://www.complex-systems.com/pdf/15-1-1.pdf |archivedate=28 May 2016}}</ref>

==References==
{{Reflist}}

==External links==
*[http://www.paradise.caltech.edu/~cook/ Personal web site]
*[https://www.ini.uzh.ch/en/institute/people?uname=tneary Site at INI Zurich]

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Cook, Matthew}}
[[Category:20th-century American mathematicians]]
[[Category:21st-century American mathematicians]]
[[Category:California Institute of Technology alumni]]
[[Category:Cellular automatists]]
[[Category:People from Evanston, Illinois]]
[[Category:1970 births]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:International Mathematical Olympiad participants]]
[[Category:Mathematicians from Illinois]]