Matthew Cook was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, in 1970 and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. His undergraduate studies were at the University of Illinois and the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program. In 1990, Cook went to work for Wolfram Research, makers of the computer algebra system Mathematica. In 1999, Cook went to Caltech for doctoral work in Computation and Neural Systems.
In the 1980s Cook excelled in mathematics, winning national competitions and qualifying as a member of the six-person US team to the International Mathematical Olympiad.
In the 1990s Cook worked as a research assistant to Stephen Wolfram, where among other things he developed a proof showing that the Rule 110cellular automaton is Turing-complete. Cook presented his proof at the Santa Fe Institute conference CA98. Wolfram Research claimed that by publicly discussing his proof, Cook might be in violation of his NDA, and they blocked the publication of his proof from the conference proceedings. However, in 2002, Wolfram's own book, A New Kind of Science, presented an outline of the proof. Finally, in 2004, Wolfram's journal Complex Systems published Cook's original proof. Rule 110 is an extremely simple system, and the fact that it is Turing-complete is remarkable.
Matthew, son of Abraham Cook born the 27 June, ____.
Cook” and a corresponding debit in the account of John Cook to “yr.
MatthewCooke (1690s - ?) There is no further mention of him other than the entry in the St. Peter’s Parish vestry book. Given that more than a third of all children born around this time did not live to reach majority, it is not unusual that we should have no further record of him.
Both land grants to Abraham Cook would have been on the Hanover County side of the river about 2 or 3 miles east of the border of present-day Louisa County. They were evidently several miles west of the land he owned a few years earlier.
On 18 February 1723 two additional patents were recorded. “Abraham Cook of Hanover County” patented 400 acres on the south side of the North Anna River “beginning at Abraham Cook’s lower corner red Oake on the river.”[27] This land was clearly adjacent to the 504 acres he already owned.
Might Abraham Cooke have been another son of John Cooke I? Possible, but I can’t see any way to prove it. This may just be an interesting coincidence. The fact that the same names should appear associated with these Cooks may merely reflect the relatively sparse population of the area.
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