Matthew Cook: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

In the 1990's Matthew Cook served as a research assistant to Stephen Wolfram, where among other things he developed a proof showing that the Rule 110 cellular automaton is Turing-complete. In violation of his Wolfram Research NDA, Cook presented his proof prior to the publication of A New Kind of Science at a Santa Fe Institute conference. Subsequently, it was stricken from the published proceedings by court order. Rule 110 is an extremely simple system, and the fact that it is Turing-complete is remarkable.

Cook was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, in 1970 and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He studied at the University of Illinois and in Hungary before going to work for Wolfram. He later went to Caltech for doctoral work in Computation and Neural Systems.