I should admit up top that I’m a fan of Stephen Wolfram. The math geek in me enjoys getting over my head in his Mathematica programming language, his weighty and controversial A New Kind of Science, with its examination of whether simple programs underlie the complex universe, may live up to its title, and while Wolfram|Alpha doesn’t keep Sergey Brin and Larry Page up late at night, it is a fascinating marriage of a powerful computational engine with the most straightforward of contemporary user interfaces: a search box.