I've been hearing/seeing Stephen Wolfram's name for about 2 decades. Each time I see it, it's associated with some supposed incredible breakthrough in math, science, physics, or perhaps a combination of those; and that's it. There's never any application to the real world, there's never any great discovery that enlightens or improves the common man's life. You could argue I'm not smart enough to understand his work, but I could argue he's not smart enough to make the importance of his work comprehensible to dumb people like me.
Well, the majority of academic work in physics is not at all enlightening to the "common man". And yet Wolfram's career has benefited and enlightened the common man 100x more than the average academic through Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica alone.
