I must admit that before all of the recent WolframAlpha excitement I didn't know much about Stephen Wolfram. By all accounts he is an impressive person so I decided to watch a talk he gave on his book A New Kind of Science.
In general, I find the kinds of cellular automata and computability theory that Wolfram discusses to be very interesting. However, I'm in no position to judge the quality or validity of his conclusions. To that end a quick google search uncovered this commentary by Cosma Shalizi which appears to question at least the originality of Wolfram's work. It sounds like an unfortunate situation for all involved.
Someday I may pick up a copy of A New Kind of Science but in the meantime I may read some of Wolfram's papers as the topic does interest me. Based on the commentary linked above, I ordered a copy of The Recursive Universe and look forward to reading it.
