Wolfram Tutor
Wolfram Tutor is an ambitious project to create an AI-based math tutor that actually works, driven by a one million dollar grant from the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Foundation, with design, development, and deployment resources provided by Wolfram Research, creators of Wolfram|Alpha. The sole focus of the grant is to improve student’s progress in Algebra 1, as the rough water in which many students flounder, never to recover.
LLM technology is exciting and powerful, but in its current form it is not trustworthy as a tutor. It makes elementary mistakes, invents facts, and is particularly, startlingly bad at math.
Wolfram Research has done pioneering work to implant Wolfram|Alpha and Wolfram Language into the best existing LLMs, including GPT-4 from OpenAI. This greatly improves performance in math and general factual accuracy, but more needs to be done.
We are working on a system that will combine multiple separate AI models, databases, and curriculum sources to finally, after seven decades of failure, deliver on the promise of computers as guides to learning.
To make this happen, we need to work with educators who want to try out our system before it’s good. We need feedback, advice, criticism, collaboration, and exposure to the harsh reality of actual students. We’re not new at this, we’ve been around the block, and we know how badly software has done so far. But we also believe that LLMs are something genuinely new in the world. How that will play out no one knows, but we intend to follow this horse where it runs, and maybe do some good.
Our Team
Educational Leadership
Jerry Glynn
Jerry Glynn graduated as a mechanical engineer in 1960 and has spent the years since deeply involved in math education and reform. He has been a classroom teacher and organized summer schools. From 1966-69 he was at the Madison Project, an NSF and US Office of Education funded effort to develop new math content for middle schools and train thousands of teachers from around the country.
In 1969 he became the founding director of the New City School in St. Louis, which is still in operation today. From 1972-76 he worked with the PLATO system at the University of Illinois, one of the first large-scale implementations of programmed learning that has had a major influence on generations of software since.
Since 1976 he has operated The Math Program, a private tutoring service serving students of all ages.
Always interested in new, effective technologies for teaching math, Jerry formed a company with his wife Joyce to distribute Derive, an early computer algebra system. In addition to writing a book about Derive, Jerry co-authored four books with Theodore Gray about using Mathematica in education.
Product Leadership
Theodore Gray
Theodore Gray is the cofounder of Wolfram Research and inventor of the widely used Notebook paradigm for interacting with computing systems (since poorly copied by Jupyter notebooks). During the early history of Wolfram Research, he was the author, with educator Jerry Glynn, of several books on the use of Mathematica in math education. In 2009, he took a sidetrack and became a New York Times best-selling author with his book The Elements, a National Magazine Award finalist for his column in Popular Science magazine and a BAFTA award winner as the writer/director of Disney Animated, 2013 iPad App of the Year. Since returning to WRI, he has focused on the integration of LLMs with notebooks in the form of Chat Notebooks and is currently working on developing innovative teaching approaches based on Chat Notebook technology.
Jon Woodard
Jon Woodard serves as a Director at Wolfram Research, and has played a crucial role in establishing subsidiary companies in emerging technology areas. Prior to this, he was a valuable member of the team responsible for devising and implementing monetization strategies for Wolfram|Alpha. Jon brings a wealth of expertise in economics and computational neuroscience to his current position, and has a deep appreciation for education derived from his upbringing as the child of two school teachers.
Peter Overmann
Peter Overmann is a tech leader, strategy advisor and scientist with more than 20 years of international executive experience. At Wolfram Research he has led R&D and helped launch Wolfram|Alpha. Most recently, Peter has rejoined Wolfram as Chief Commercial Officer.