Elise Cawley, a mathematician and spouse of Stephen Wolfram, died on September 2026 after a massive cardiovascular event following heart surgery. She was born in Urbana, Illinois in 1961 and grew up in Columbia, Maryland. She earned degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of Maryland and completed a PhD in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, supported by a Hertz Foundation fellowship. Cawley held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study and served as a tenure‑track professor at Stony Brook University before joining the University of Chicago, where she taught a course on Gibbs theory and contributed to research on dynamical systems, Teichmüller spaces, and thermodynamic formalism. She co‑developed a master’s program in financial mathematics with Bob Zimmer, chairman of the University of Chicago mathematics department. Cawley married Wolfram in 1994 and they had four children born between 1995 and 2004. The family designed and built a house in Concord, Massachusetts, incorporating architectural features derived from mathematical concepts. She participated in the Stanford Online High School community advisory group and served on the board of the Hertz Foundation. Cawley was active in mathematics outreach, coaching MathCounts teams and publishing on topics such as infection dynamics during the COVID‑19 pandemic. She died instantly after the cardiovascular event, which occurred while she was recovering from surgery.