Alex Wissner-Gross is a serial big-picture thinker. He applies physics and computer science principles to a wide variety of topics, like human intelligence, climate change and financial trading.

Lately Wissner-Gross started wondering: Why have we searched for so long to understand intelligence? Can it really be this elusive? His latest work posits that intelligence can indeed be defined physically, as a dynamic force, rather than a static property. He explains intelligence in terms of causal entropic forces, ultimately defining it as "a force to maximize future freedom of action."

Wissner-Gross is a fellow at the Harvard Institute for Applied Computational Science and a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab. He has a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard and bachelor's degrees in physics, electrical science and engineering, and mathematics from MIT.