This article originally appeared on TechRepublic. When it came to figuring out which computer scientist should help linguists decipher inscrutable alien texts, it was Stephen Wolfram who got the call. Sure, these extraterrestrials may only have existed in the sci-fi movie Arrival, but if ET ever does drop out of orbit, Wolfram might well still be on the short list of people to contact. Download this article as a PDF (free registration required). The British-born computer scientist's life is littered with exceptional achievements -- completing a PhD in theoretical physics at Caltech at age 20, winning a MacArthur Genius Grant at 21, and creating the technical computing platform Mathematica (which is used by millions of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers worldwide), plus the Wolfram Language, and the Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine.

A pseudorandom number generator produces numbers deterministically but they seem aperiodic (random) most of the time for most use-cases. The generator accepts a seed value (ideally a true random number) and starts producing the sequence as a function of this seed and/or a previous number of the sequence. These are Pseudorandom (not truly random) because if seed value is known they can be determined algorithmically. True random numbers are hardware generated or generated from blood volume pulse, atmospheric pressure, thermal noise, quantum phenomenon, etc. There are lots of techniques to generate Pseudorandom numbers, namely: Blum Blum Shub algorithm, Middle-square method, Lagged Fibonacci generator, etc.