“I met Steve Jobs nearly a quarter of a century ago when he had left Apple and was working on building his NeXT computer and I was working on building the first version of our Mathematica software system,” Stephen Wolfram writes for The Observer. “Our first meeting was classic Steve Jobs. He explained that he expected that what he was doing would change the world and, by the way, make a lot of money too. And he told me he was picking all sorts of bold new hardware and software technologies for his computer and he wanted one of them to be Mathematica. Steve took a great interest in the development of Mathematica; in fact, it was he who suggested the name.”

“One of the things I always admired about Steve Jobs was his clarity of thought,” Wolfram writes. “Time and again, he would take a complex situation, understand its essence and use that understanding to make a bold and unexpected move.”

Wolfram writes, “There was a human side to him as well. I remember visiting him once in his swanky offices in Redwood City. We were talking about technology strategy, when suddenly he apologised for being distracted. He said he was going out that night on a date with a woman he’d met the day before and suddenly all his confidence as a technologist and businessman melted away. Happily, the date worked out and the woman he met became his wife for the rest of his life.”

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