Theodore Gray was a member of the Uni High Class of 1982 and graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1986. He then pursued a PhD in theoretical chemistry at the prestigious University of California at Berkeley, only to leave in 1987 to work with, and eventually co-found, Wolfram Research, which innovated such products as the “smart” search engine Wolfram Alpha and the Mathematica software which a powerful tool used in mathematics and computer science. 

He later left to become a full-time writer and publisher, writing a regular column for Popular Science called “Gray Matter,” which was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Best Column in 2010. That same year, he wrote and directed a Disney Animated app (produced by Touchpress, a company he co-founded with Max Whitbly, John Cromie, and Stephen Wolfram) which was named the best iPad app of 2013 by Apple and was awarded the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award in 2014. He has developed a range of acrylic model kits he calls “Mechanical GIFs” to help understand how machines, devices, gadgets, and mechanisms work. Most notably, he has collected thousands of samples of elements spanning almost all of the periodic table, and wrote the famous trilogy Elements, Molecules, and Reactions.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Gray

http://home.theodoregray.com/