Eric W. Weisstein studied physics and astronomy at Cornell University and Caltech and received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1996. In 1995, Weisstein took the vast collection of mathematical facts that he had been accumulating since his teenage years and began deploying them on the early internet. These efforts at organizing and presenting online content helped define a paradigm that has subsequently been followed by other large-scale informational projects on the web. After three years at the University of Virginia, Weisstein joined Wolfram in 1999, and the new MathWorld website was unveiled at mathworld.wolfram.com later that year.
After spending his initial years at Wolfram working primarily on MathWorld, Weisstein became involved with Wolfram|Alpha during its early planning stages. In the intervening years, he has worked on a number of areas involving that site and the Wolfram Knowledgebase. He currently maintains the majority of mathematical domains in Wolfram|Alpha, the graph and polyhedron data collections in the Wolfram Language and Wolfram|Alpha's system of units and physical quantities.
Weisstein is a sought-after speaker on mathematics communication, scientific computing and knowledge management on the internet. He has given invited talks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Caltech, Cornell University, Brussels and Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, the University of Coimbra and other institutions. He was co-investigator on Wolfram's contributions to the National Science Digital Library, co-organizer of the Semantic Representation of Mathematical Knowledge Workshop held at the Fields Institute, Toronto, member of the Global Digital Mathematics Library working group and lead developer for the History of Mathematics Project. He has also served as a consultant for the CBS television crime drama NUMB3RS and as mathematics judge for the final round of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology.
Weisstein resides in northwest Ohio, where he enjoys encouraging his two children as they develop their skills in mathematics, competitive swimming and soccer and many other areas.