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Published online 24 October 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2007.190
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Student snags maths prize
Stephen Wolfram's $25,000 prize claimed.
A twenty-year-old university student has answered a challenge by one of the world's most well-known mathematicians.
Alex Smith, a undergraduate electrical engineering student at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, has proven that a primitive type of computer known as a 2,3 Turing machine can solve every computational problem there is.
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Some days ago I wrote an explanation about why the small universal Turing machine research and in particular the recent universality proof of Wolfram's 2,3 Turing machine is relevant to computer science. Certainly, Scott Aaronson does not belong to the field so he probably does not follow its evolution and is not aware about their several up-to-date contributions (in which Stephen Wolfram himself has also contributed before): http://www.mathrix.org/liquid/?p=155
The author of the previous comment and the explanation it cites was actually my colleague Hector Zenil - sorry for the signature confusion.