12 ms·
Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]
- martinky24 3y agoWolfram is insufferable in short form -- imagine listening to him talk for 4 hours!
- ninetyninenine 3y agoEh he might be right. I would listen to his ideas dispassionately. Many geniuses who were right were ridiculed.
- martinky24 3y agoFor every genius who was right and ridiculed, and celebrated accordingly, there are many people who were wrong and ridiculed, and forgotten accordingly.
- ninetyninenine 3y agoThose that were forgotten may be right too. I would still listen dispassionately. He's smarter than most people on this thread, that's for sure. Being logical is ridiculing someone for being wrong, not for being full of himself. Many geniuses were ass holes.
- martinky24 3y agoI assure you -- There's nothing wrong with ridiculing someone for being an asshole. How you interact with other people matters, like it or not.
- ninetyninenine 3y agoI never said there was nothing wrong with it. I said to be logical you should only ridicule people for being wrong. Ridiculing someone for being an ass hole is valid but illogical. There is merit to this distinction because sometimes the ass hole is right and everyone else is wrong. The key here is dispassionate judgment and analysis. Can you handle that? If not that's totally normal and valid.
- aeonik 3y agoHis work is definitely worthwhile. Wolfram Language by itself is actually very cool. I really wish he would open source it. I'm not going to use any math package that isn't open source for anything. I think his physics work is pretty interesting as well. I think the reason he aggrandizes, and this is only speculation, is because he is pushing the envelope in many fields simultaneously and wants to "credentialize" himself, and give people context on his background. He might also be insecure self-absorbed. Which, while annoying, doesn't disqualify someone's ideas by itself. It just means you might need to watch for ego-based confabulations in their work. It might also mean he's a pain to work with, if it is indeed an ego thing. But I don't know the guy... so it's all speculation.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago> His work is definitely worthwhile. Wolfram Language by itself is actually very cool. I really wish he would open source it. I'm not going to use any math package that isn't open source for anything. Here is the official statements of Wolfram Research on this topic: > Why Wolfram Tech Isn’t Open Source—A Dozen Reasons > https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op... See also > Episode 1: Thoughts on Wolfram & Open Source > https://soundcloud.com/wolframresearch/wolfram-on-open-source https://soundcloud.com/wolframresearch/wolfram-on-open-sourc... If you nevertheless insist on having an open source implementation of the Wolfram language, have a look at the answers at > https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/4454/is-there-an-open-source-implementation-of-mathematica-the-language https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/4454/is-ther...
- aeonik 3y agoI don't have an answer for him. I don't mind paying money for software, I get his points, but at the same time, it's a non-starter for me. When it comes to math. Especially a system as cool as Wolfram Language, I want to hack on the insides. I don't publish things, or have time right now. But in 10 years, I estimate I'm going to be wanting to compile math software on radically different chips and ISAs. Without an open source language, everything I build on top of the system will be incompatible with hardware specific instructions, unless they compiled it for that chip, often missing very specific optimizations (which could be improved even today). Or I would need to virtualize. All this math code will the most important and hottest running code paths in my system, and won't even be able to compile to experimental ISAs or their extensions to take advantage.
- lupire 3y agoWorlfram's ideas aren't wrong, aside from technical disputes. Anyone can learn a heck of a lot from Wolfram. It's his way of making everything about himself and his plagiarism that put people off. He's Feynman without the charm.
- deviantbit 3y agoHe is no Feynman. Feynman warned us about people like him and this kind of alternative science. No one is saying anything.
- simiones 3y agoHas Wolfram ever done a short form interview?
- rezmason 3y agoI didn't know Wolfram was even available in short form. I bought NKS for fifty bucks twenty years ago because I thought I could form a group around it that would take turns summing up chapters for each other, but unfortunately, if humans who give a f** represent states and the number of f**s a human can give represent colors, we're talking about a 1,0 turing machine here.
- rcarmo 3y agoI actually laughed out loud at "I didn't know Wolfram was even available in short form." That said, I too have read a lot of his work (yes, even A New Kind of Science). I came away very impressed but lacking the right kind of framing to make the best of it (which is, I suspect, what most people who actually make the effort will feel).
- andyjohnson0 3y agoI usually defend him from the inevitable HN accusations of hubris. But four hours is a nope from me. Would be interested in a written summary though.
- crmd 3y agoI’m holding out for the 8-hour Stephen Wolfram Eric Weinstein Dueling Life Arcs documentary.
- Whitespace 3y agoLarry Ellison enters the chat
- Whitespace 3y agoI respect the work that he's done and the contributions he's given to humanity but for once I would like to see something by Stephen Wolfram that didn't involve at least 50% of the content being a form of self-aggrandizement. I find that everything I try to consume from him contains his autobiography interspersed in the giant wall of text. This video is exquisitely cringeworthy.
- zhynn 3y agoblah blah (which I did in 1988) blah blah (which I completed in 1992). He has no collaborators. He gives no credit to others. He just relentlessly names things after himself, takes singular credit for everything, and name-drops other famous scientists he bumped into. I genuinely find the wolfram physics project interesting, but the behavior of wolfram himself sets off all my bullshit alarms. I suspect that it will be someone else that will take these ideas over the finish line. He seems completely oblivious to the fact that his behavior makes it harder to take the ideas seriously. My gateway to the ideas was Jonathan Gorard. Check out his videos if you are curious, they are much more accessible than Wolfram's own content.
- screenoridesagb 3y ago[dead]
- graphe 3y agoThe stallman of physics.
- CuriouslyC 3y agoAt least Stallman is charming in his uncouth, nerdy way.
- lukan 3y agoThat is .. debatable. Or rather subjective.
- 3y ago
- jack_riminton 3y agoSomehow people who are most convinced of their genius are the least interesting to me. Contrast with Roger Penrose and you couldn't meet a more humble, interesting and interested conversationalist
- moelf 3y agoidk which is more cringeworth, Wolfram's computational reality https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-criticize-stephen-wolframs-theory-of-everything/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic... or Penrose's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...
- xdavidliu 3y agoDon Knuth and Preet Bharara too. I had an advisor in undergrad in plasma physics named Roscoe White who was also quite humble and brilliant.
- Mistletoe 3y agoFeynman never needed to tell you how smart he was, it just flowed out naturally as he talked about things in his beautiful clear way.
- thefaux 3y agoDisagree on Feynman. He seemed extraordinarily invested in showing off and self-mythologizing.
- vunderba 3y agoYeah, very obviously a highly intelligent man but it's immediately obvious that he was very carefully crafting how he wanted to be perceived by others in several of his self aggrandizing memoirs.
- xetplan 3y agoMurray Gell-Mann said exactly this. He basically got tired of working with him because everything about his personality was to generate stories and mythologies about himself. To me, this whole idea shows what a fool the average man is. As if we all know so much about Richard Feynman compared to Murray Gell-Mann because of what a great scientist Richard Feynman was. When OBVIOUSLY, the reason is because of the degree Feynman self promoted himself compared to other scientists.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- max_ 3y agoI love Stephen Wolfram so much that I may even consider him a role model. I understand the need for the masses to have people ideas that are obviously practical. Stephen Wolfram is more of an explore. And he is documenting phenomena that I don't see any one else doing because everyone else is so teleological. I think we need to give a break to researchers doing this original non teleological research. I don't understand why people find him "insufferable"?
- jcgrillo 3y agoHere's one example: http://bactra.org/weblog/915.html http://bactra.org/weblog/915.html
- FPGAhacker 3y agoIs there something wrong there? I’m sorry if I’m being dense.
- jcgrillo 3y agoAttempting to goad a critical reviewer into engaging in some sort of comments-section "public debate" (assuming that somehow the public discussion would change the reviewer's mind) a _decade_ after the fact? That behavior is, in a word, insufferable. EDIT: Also, "I know it was a challenge to review a book of its size..." comes off as insinuating that (1) the book is somehow "grand" and (2) maybe the reviewer didn't "get it".
- FPGAhacker 3y agoI remember when it came out because a friend was excited about it. As I recall it’s a pretty large book. Edit: just under 1200 pages on Amazon. I never got into it because I couldn’t figure out what the big revelation was supposed to be. It would take some serious dedication to go through such a large book for the sake of an unfavorable review. I take wolfram’s words at face value.
- azinman2 3y ago
- limpbizkitfan 3y agoI sometimes wonder if he even uses deodorant. He liked to work remote and bother people via an iPad Segway robot. If you had to chaperone him in an elevator there you would understand he likes to talk about himself.
- animanoir 3y agoI LOVE Stephen Wolfram.
- physicsguy 3y ago"It all started when I invented cellular automata, this thing that will revolutionise computing... at some point."
- ThisIsMyAltAcct 3y agoIs this an actual quote from the video? I'm not going to scrub through 4 hours of footage to find out, sorry.
- sokoloff 3y agoIt's not (as far as I can tell). The closest thing I can quickly find in the transcript is the following: Copied from transcript and lightly reformatted, but otherwise not corrected (girdle for Gödel, etc all left intact): 1:40:2x in the fall of 1981 and I spent that time kind of studying The Works of people like bonan and girdle and bunch of stuff about neural Nets and I was that was all in kind of the can I understand foundationally how complexity shows up in the world and that caused me to um uh to kind of um uh try and develop sort of the simplest model that might do something interesting and it led me to these things called cellular autometer which are very simple uh systems where like tiny programs where you just have a row of black and white cells and you just have a rule that says how to update those cells and um I started looking at those things in the fall of 1981 and "It led me to" does not imply "led me to [discover/invent]" but rather "led me to [start studying]" His own notes here directly state that they were considered long before he studied them: https://www.wolframscience.com/reference/notes/876b/ https://www.wolframscience.com/reference/notes/876b/
- physicsguy 3y agoNo, of course not, it's just me parodying Stephen Wolfram every time he speaks/writes. He wrote a book called 'A New Kind of Science' claiming all this stuff in about 2002 which was widely criticised by scientists as overstating it's claims and much less important than he thinks it is, but he's been talking like that ever since pretty much.
- cc101 3y agoHe is bright. He has important things to say. Learning what he has to say takes way too much time. Until he gets a merciless editor, I won't listen to him.
- yangikan 3y agoHe records every aspect of his life -- even design meetings. You can watch it all here: https://livestreams.stephenwolfram.com/ https://livestreams.stephenwolfram.com/
- globalise83 3y agoWow, that's crazy. Imagine you have to be a very chilled character to be happy to be micromanaged by your boss (for example https://www.youtube.com/live/rtkioIv7x_Q?feature=shared&t=1487 https://www.youtube.com/live/rtkioIv7x_Q?feature=shared&t=14...) and then have the meeting immediately put up on Youtube.
- adamgordonbell 3y agoSo, story time. I once interviewed Stephen Wolfram for IEEE's software engineering radio and I had a lot of fun doing it and he did to. We ended up running way overtime because he was having fun showing me things with Mathematica. He is a fascinating person, I successfully kept him off talking about his math / physics theories and on the idea of a programming language leading to better thinking and more break-throughs. I left the discussion pretty impressed by him and he did in the discussion have some vague worries that he maybe got so focused on the idea of a notation for science in Mathematica that he neglected the actual work that sent him on this path. But he wasn't sure that the notation wasn't more valuable itself. Notebooks, like Jupter, clearly came from his work and the other thing that hasn't reached mainstream he seems to have invented is having data sort of embedded in the programming language, in standard libraries, where it's easy to get the number of calories in the moon if it were made of cheese or whatever.
- lupire 3y agoNotation, or semantics? Mathematica has no notation, and that's the worst thing about it. Mathematics has M-Expressions, like S-Expressions, which are extremely powerfully and human-like for reasoning in multiple logical (not geometric) dimensions (using Lisp-style macro expansion)
- adamgordonbell 3y agoIt's been a long time since the discussion, but I think he was getting at the whorf hypothesis. If you could express certain ideas easily it would enable thinking about certain things more deeply and intelligently.
- graphe 3y agoNot only that, but the intonation also changes people’s personalities. Notice how there are round calming words and sharper ones, like the ohm in mantras give an o sound and a word like stab has a sharper intonation. If sapolsky believes the Sapir whorf hypothesis I do too.
- 3y ago
- meindnoch 3y agoCmd+F "aggrandize" Only 2 instances so far?!
- overvale 3y agoAnd only 1 "arrogant"! (so far)
- Shrezzing 3y agoThis is somewhat off-topic, but does Wolfram have a degenerative muscle illness? He puts his right hand down at around 30 minutes, and then doesn't move it again for hours. That and his unmoving legs are strikingly reminiscent of a friend who had MS.
- rafram 3y agoHe gestures with both his hands frequently throughout the entire video, not just before the 30 minute mark. I think this is just confirmation bias. And frankly, if he did have a degenerative muscle illness, that would be nobody’s business but his own.
- Shrezzing 3y agoThat's fair, and you're entirely correct that its nobody's business but his own.
- dachworker 3y agoHere's a question. Why isn't Wolfram Research considered a sexy employer? They have cool research and technical problems and cool software. I looked a bit into it but I could only see them hiring in 3rd world countries, and only contractors. So are they a bad employer or what gives?
- bmitc 3y agoI looked into it a while back and the synopsis was that you needed to move there and that they paid poorly.
- danpalmer 3y agoI think they're very traditional – I don't think software or engineering is their edge, and I suspect they outsource a lot of that to cheaper locations – they seem themselves as being more research focused. Their Glassdoor reviews used to be a bit dodgy too, nothing you wouldn't be able to guess after watching 10 minutes of any video of you-know-who though. They are also just small, only a few hundred people if I remember correctly.
- dachworker 3y agoWait, isn't software their product? Or are you distinguishing between their infrastructural and their math/science libraries?
- bmitc 3y agoI sent them an email asking what .NET version their .NET link library used, asking if it was still .NET Framework or if it had moved to .NET Core or 5+. The question seemed incomprehensible to them. They barely understood what I was asking, and I never heard back from them.
- danpalmer 3y agoSoftware is their product, but my guess is there's a separation between the product and research side which will be filled with Phds, and the "build" side which I expect is outsourced or offshored. What I really mean is that I don't think they see themselves as an engineering company in the way FAANG do, or an "AI" company, but probably more like a maths/science department at a university.
- bitwize 3y agoAnd this is why I thought Sheldon Cooper (of The Big Bang Theory) was supposed to be a parody of Stephen Wolfram, specifically.
- rdtsc 3y agoI remember buying his A New Kind of Science book before it was available for free. It was interesting to read, and it was good enough to impress a college kid like me back then. But now, looking back, I wonder what fields of science has it advanced? It's been more than 20 years already, and with a title like that, we'd expect a completely upturned physics, biology, and other disciplines based on it.
- jerf 3y agoAfter pondering it for a while, the problem is that CAs are too chaotic to use, and there is simply no way to overcome this, nor is there even particularly a reason to try. Anything that is Turing Complete is going to exhibit at least some degree of what I call "Turing Chaos", which is the sort of chaos you have in trying to understand what a given Turing Complete system is going to do in light of the fact that a Turing Complete system is going to include some equivalent of "if (something) { run this program } else { run that program }", which means that there is inevitably going to be uncertainty amplification in any attempt to understand a program. By "uncertainty amplification" I mean exactly what anyone who has every tried to understand a code base has been through; you can tell that your uncertainty about what the "something" value is gets amplified into the question of which entire program is being run, and that can iterate for quite a while. It's very chaotic. However, for all that, and despite the famous way in which changing a single bit of a program may completely change how it operates, in practice with real human programs changing a single random bit is statistically most likely to have no user-visible impact. We spend a lot of time constraining our system's chaos. We have to. We can't work with systems in which literally every bit change completely changes the program. However, CAs tend to work that way. A single bit flip will spread out at the relevant "speed of light" and change everything. As a result, while they may be some of the simplest Turing Complete things, they are humanly useless. They are not useful for modeling processes; you have to be too precise with the initial states, and the thing you are modeling has to be too precise in its usage of the CA rules. They are not useful for engineering, which is precisely why we don't use them. Or, to put it in a nutshell, while A New Kind Of Science is full of pretty pictures and legitimately interesting ideas... it's also in essence, comprehensively wrong. Not a "not even wrong"; it rises to the level of "real" wrongness. But it's comprehensively, from top to bottom, wrong about practical utility or any future practical utility. (You can sit down and try to strip this characteristic from a sufficiently well-designed CA, but getting the precise balance of just the right amount of chaos is going to be difficult, and getting it to be also somehow useful afterwards raising the bar even higher. In the meantime, I've got von Neumann machines right here for people who want to do real work and the lambda calculus for people who want to work directly in mathematical abstractions without going insane, so... why?)
- xaellison 3y agoScientific American I think did a balanced article about this character: https://web.archive.org/web/20231231040033/https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-criticize-stephen-wolframs-theory-of-everything/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231231040033/https://www.scien... My favorite quotes: when provided with some of the responses from other physicists regarding his work, Wolfram is singularly unenthused. “I’m disappointed by the naivete of the questions that you’re communicating,” he grumbles. “I deserve better.” “There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories,” the late physicist Freeman Dyson told Newsweek back in 2002. “Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.”
- throwup238 3y ago> “There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories,” the late physicist Freeman Dyson told Newsweek back in 2002. “Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.” That is a brutal take down. Did Dyson and Wolfram have a math-beef going or something?
- ska 3y agoI think it's more that Wolfram has stepped on enough toes that he earns takes like this. He's an interesting character, and rare in that is his both obviously very intelligent, and yet not nearly as intelligent as he thinks he is. I suspect he's the sort of person who can't stand the idea that he is not the smartest guy in the room - in perception or reality. He may well have constructed his career as an "outsider" to reduce the occurrences of this, perhaps not intentionally.
- iancmceachern 3y agoTotally, that whole writeup about his daily routine with that "portable" computer. He wasn't self aware enough to get outside his own nonesense.
- theaussiestew 3y ago
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y agoInterview with Stephen Wolfram on his favorite subject. EDIT 1: Maybe I'll update this as I listen, maybe not we'll see. But so far: - Doesn't remember anything he used to talk about with his parents. Doesn't remember any particularly interesting conversations. Doesn't know anything about his parent's political inclinations. - He a brother younger by 10 years. Says he was an "only child for about 10 years". For the rest of the conversation says his parent's experience with children were data size 1. EDIT 2: getting super tedious. I'd like to hear what his kids or his brother think of him.
- sokoloff 3y agoWhen your comment was just the first sentence, it made me laugh out loud after the perfect short delay to comprehend it.
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y agoYeah, some times less is more.
- sneed_chucker 3y agoI do not care that Stephen Wolfram is full of himself. Every tech CEO is full of themselves too, but because Stephen is an awkward looking nerdy guy who is less business oriented people dislike him for it. He's an interesting guy, even if he isn't as interesting as he thinks he is.
- The_Colonel 3y agoI think people take issue with CEOs pretending to be experts in things where they aren't - Wolfram in physics, Musk in geopolitics and freedom of speech etc.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago> I think people take issue with CEOs pretending to be experts in things where they aren't - Wolfram in physics Stephen Wolfram has a PhD in particle physics (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stephen_Wolfram&oldid=1207671007#Education https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stephen_Wolfram&o...).
- eigenket 3y agoThat emphatically does not make him an expert in physics today. A PhD means he was an expert is some narrow niche of physics four decades ago.
- Suppafly 3y agoWolfram literally is an expert in physics though. Most of the criticism, even in these comments seems to boil down to not liking the guy because he's smart or because his big ideas are incomprehensible if aren't familiar with the fields in which he is more knowledgeable than most people. It's ok to not like the guy, but let's not pretend it's for any real objective reason.
- lukan 3y ago"Most of the criticism, even in these comments seems to boil down to not liking the guy because he's smart or because his big ideas are incomprehensible" No, most of the criticism comes from the fact, that he has a super high ego, thinking he is always the smartest person in the room, making him treat others badly. See the comments from people working for him. And his big ideas - well, he claims he found the holy grail of physics, the theory of everything. And he wrote a bestseller for the masses. But actual physicists are not convinced because his model is simply worse at predicting data of experiments, than other models (which do not claim to be theories of everything). And he reacts poorly to this criticism. So yes, he is smart and a interesting character. But maybe not one who solved the theory of everything. Because if he really would have - then the results would speak for itself. So I am not ruling out that his approach can one day lead towards it (not my area of expertize) - but apparently he is not there, but claims he is.
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- bbsz 3y agoI wonder if New Kind of Science will end up like Godel, Escher, Bach ended up after release of GPT4[0]. It will be interesting to see what concept/formalization(?) will basically invalidate 50% of the research made by Wolfram. I'll spare myself commenting on Wolfram, it's enough to do Ctrl+F on "arrogant" in this topic. Frankly, I don't even care. It's just that New Kind of Science didn't meaningfully advance anywhere beyond being "an interesting concept" for all of his natural life. [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP/douglas-hofstadter-changes-his-mind-on-deep-learning-and-ai https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP/douglas-ho...
- glimshe 3y agoHe's arrogant, he doesn't give credits to others. So what? Silly Ad hominem attack. Not listening to him because of this is a mistake, Wolfram is a true genius and, even if "his" ideas aren't fully his, you will probably not hear them with such clarity anywhere else. He is, at a minimum, an amazing explainer like few people I've ever seen.
- jcgrillo 3y agoPopulism, it works! EDIT: Generally when people are "true geniuses" their _peers_ identify them as such. That's not the case here.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago> EDIT: Generally when people are "true geniuses" their _peers_ identify them as such. Counterexample: Kurt Heegener. OK, not a genius, but nevertheless a mathematician whose proof of a deep result (class number 1 problem [1]) was not accepted by his peers Quote from [2]: "In 1952, he published the Stark–Heegner theorem which he claimed was the solution to a classic number theory problem proposed by the great mathematician Gauss, the class number 1 problem. Heegner's work was not accepted for years, mainly due to his quoting of a portion of Heinrich Martin Weber's work that was known to be incorrect (though he never used this result in the proof)." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Class_number_problem&oldid=1190639336 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Class_number_prob... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kurt_Heegner&oldid=1120590918#Life_and_career https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kurt_Heegner&oldi...
- jcgrillo 3y agoThis is interesting, I wasn't aware. Thank you! What I was (maybe snarkily) trying to evoke was e.g. how the way Hans Bethe spoke about Richard Feynman contrasts with how Freeman Dyson speaks about Stephen Wolfram, or Cosma Shalizi's review of A New Kind of Science. It's obviously not universally true that everyone accepts or understands a scientist's work in their time, but it's not often that a scientific "genius" is widely regarded as a crackpot among their scientific contemporaries. Extraordinary claims, etc etc.
- JackFr 3y agoHe's like an actually smart version of Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Arrogant, egotistical and dismissive but at least he has real math chops.
- leto_ii 3y agoTaleb has math chops, what are you talking about? He's also quite a bit less self-aggrandizing. Otoh, they do seem to like reach other, which in my book does cast some doubt on taleb's ability to judge people...
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y agoWhat math chops does taleb have? The same ones as any options trader, as far as I can tell.
- seanhunter 3y agoOn the options desk that I was a quant on[1] the traders were extremely dismissive of Taleb's math chops since in his book "Taleb on Risk: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options" he clearly doesn't understand delta hedging, which is a pretty fundamental concept, particularly if you're writing a book about managing options risk. [1] Equity Exotics and Hybrids at Goldman in London circa 2005 or so.
- leto_ii 3y agoOk, the guy is not some Fields medalist, so it depends what you mean by math chops, but here are a few of his papers published in respectable journals that have non negligible math content: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378437118301894 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784... (free at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.01370.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.01370.pdf) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378437110002189 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378437115001429 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784... (free at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.1791.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.1791.pdf) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378437116000923 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784... (free at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.04722.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.04722.pdf) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-0921-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-0921-x There are plenty more btw, these were the ones that I could find in more prestigious journals. if you follow him on Twitter you'll see that he also does quite a bit of recreational maths too.
- deviantbit 3y agoI don't understand why Wolfram is getting the attention he is getting. His new theory of physics is not just riddled with problems, it also riddled with erroneous claims. He has also taken credit for ideas from von Newmann and Conway. We also have this issue of undecidable problems, he wants to violate up and down. He self-published his books, so that is one problem. Feynman warned us of Cargo cult science. Here it is in action.
- johnwheeler 3y agoYeah that dude can talk. I try listening to him on Alex and he’s a windbag.
- iamnotsure 3y agoTYSM
- nojvek 3y agoI liked his interview with Lex Fridman. He's full of himself but has interesting things to say. WolframAlpha is a gem on its on right. Yeah we have Gemini, GPT, Mixtral but when it comes to actual compositional compute, Wolfram alpha gets you the right answer and shows you the math.
- contrarian1234 3y agoI'm not super up to speed on everything he's said, but he didn't seem full of himself in that podcast. He sounded quite .. normal?
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y agoI was never impressed by Wolfram alpha. In the for hour conversation on topic, he asks "if you want to know the weights of various dinosaurs, you can ask Wolfram alpha and it will tell you". So I asked it "what's the weight of a stegaussaurus", and it gave me some number. The i asked it "what's the total weight of all the stegaussaurus that ever lived" and it gave me some nonsense about the average [don't remember] for the population of the US. It didn't even understand the question. Calling it compute is overestimating it by as much as Wolfram overestimates himself.
- CraftingLinks 3y agoPeople like to talk while Wolfram walks the walk, while he talks
- Khelavaster 3y agoWolfram WAS the first set of MacArthur fellows. It counts for something..