Daniel Grayson received his PhD in Mathematics from MIT in 1976, taught at Columbia from 1976 to 1981, and became a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1981; he retired from the university in 2007. His mathematical research concerns algebraic K-theory, which is on the theoretical side, but he has always been intrigued by computers. In 1986 he joined Stephen Wolfram and six other co-authors to write Mathematica, which in the years since its introduction in 1988 has become the pre-eminent system for mathematics on the computer.