It's worth noting this was originally a blog post on Stephen Wolfram's personal blog, where you'd expect an author's voice to permeate the content (although that didn't stop people from complaining about his other blog entries). I personally appreciate authors dropping their own biographical details when they write about something else, it gives it a more personal voice. Plus, Mathematica is relevant. It's not as if he's doing product placement for Purina Puppy Chow, which is a great way to feed your growing puppy and give him all the nutrients he needs.
Who Was Ramanujan?
111–120 of 130 posts
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#112Mixed feelings about this article: 1. A fine easy read about Ramanujan and Hardy. It was well-summarized and nicely written, with excellent pictures that I had not seen before. 2. A disgusting vein of self-promotion runs throughout the article. Much has been said about Stephan Wolfram's occasionally self-centered behavior, and many of his writings have a self-aggrandizing tone to them. Thus, I was pleasantly surprise…
The great question in artificial intelligence: who will become self-aware first, Wolfram Alpha or Stephen Wolfram?
I vote for the silicon entity.
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#113A very nice article. Personally I'm not bothered by the "self-promotion" others perceive in Wolfram's posts. The criticism in the comments here are all very repetitive and tiresome. I presume many read anything written by Wolfram with the hope of finding something they can point out as self-promotion ;)
Correct, and it's time for HN to let go of it. Think of it as a test for this community: can we focus on what's interesting in what the man says and resist being trolled by the rest. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=wolfram%20derangement%20syndro...
It's understandable that you want sponsored content on HN, but could you at least mark it as such?
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Are you implying that he wrote his own Wikipedia page? In a 1997 article in Technology Review, the author said that Wolfram politely deflected personal questions about his wife and newborn child out of privacy concerns prompted by the Unabomber case.
It is not out of the question that Stephen Wolfram, if it is not he himself, does indeed have some publicists policing his Wikipedia article.
Compare the edit statistics of Stephen's page:
https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-articleinfo/?article=Stephe...
...to those of the page of an arguably even more famous research scientist, Terence Tao:
https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-articleinfo/?article=Terenc...
Notice that, (as might be reasonable to expect of many Wikipedia articles), Terence's page experienced rapid growth a few years after it's creation, then received sustained updates over time. In contrast, Stephen's page does not display this trend at all and is rather bursty.
Also notice that whereas the top editors of Tao's page are evenly distributed among many users, on Stephen's page nearly 10% of the edits and a quarter of the text comes from one editor who happens to have been affiliated with Wolfram Research.
Of course this is all anecdotal evidence and eyeball statistics at best.
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes I read it at first, and enjoyed the article in full before seeing these comments too. Reading through some of the points in the negative, I am not sure I get it. He remarks he went to a school mentioned in the article. So? And he uses Mathematica in the article to highlight some math points. Does anyone expect him to ignore the software and company he founded, and do manual calcs, or better yet, use an iPython no…
The name Wolfram (for the metal) is of German origin, IIRC. Indonesia having been a Dutch colony probably got it from the Dutch language, if I might hazard a guess.
Thanks for the source. I was just using Mathematica and seeing the 'Wolfram' in the Indonesian text just popped for me. Having a Wolf as a PL mascot for Wolfram Language is pretty cool too!
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just discovered this guy's channel the other day - and now I'm completely addicted! Help!
Fun fact: the Mathologer is also an amazing juggler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zabtIAUKVXY&feature=youtu.be...
I knew it - he's the German Claude Shannon!
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct, and it's time for HN to let go of it. Think of it as a test for this community: can we focus on what's interesting in what the man says and resist being trolled by the rest. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=wolfram%20derangement%20syndro...
Is there a meta-syndrome, wherein all submissions of Stephen Wolfram content end up discussing how unfortunate it is we're all preoccupied discussing his self promotion?
That's a secondary infection.
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#118A very nice article. Personally I'm not bothered by the "self-promotion" others perceive in Wolfram's posts. The criticism in the comments here are all very repetitive and tiresome. I presume many read anything written by Wolfram with the hope of finding something they can point out as self-promotion ;)
Correct, and it's time for HN to let go of it. Think of it as a test for this community: can we focus on what's interesting in what the man says and resist being trolled by the rest. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=wolfram%20derangement%20syndro...
It isn't that simple: yesterday, after seeing your comment I carefully read Wolfram's article from beginning to end. I enjoyed it while trying to skip the ads.
Today, when I was thinking about Ramanujan, he was inextricably linked to Wolfram/Mathematica. This sort of thing is sinister and it's exactly the reason why people are getting worked up about it.
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it wasn't too distracting in this article, and it was so well written that it's actually hard to notice.
I wrote this up last night but decided not to post it, but why not, since it's topical now. He might've learned from the criticism last time. sed 's/[^a-zA-Z]/ /' rama.txt | tr ' ' '\n' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | egrep "^(mine|his|me|i|him|he)$"| sort | uniq -c | sort -n 11 me 15 him 82 i 107 his 148 he sed 's/[^a-zA-Z]/ /' minsk.txt | tr ' ' '\n' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | egrep "^(mine|his|me|i|him|he)$"| s…
Well, Wolfram also spent time with Minsky, so he'd have stories to recount, but not with Ramanujan. That alone would explain the numbers.
I find the Ramanujan story actually reads more like a Mathematica advert, whereas the other more like a very self-involved eulogy.
Re: Who Was Ramanujan?
#120I was lucky enough to see The Man Who Knew Infinity this past weekend at the San Francisco International Film Festival. And I'd just like to say that it is a truly beautiful film, and I encourage everyone to go see it. After the showing, there was a panel discussion with the director, composer, producer, two actors (Stephen Fry!), and three consulting mathematicians who helped the production. One of the topics that c…
I agree. This is such a great movie. They put a lot of effort in making the math accessible to all.