151–160 of 181 posts
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> He just relentlessly names things after himself Well "Wolfram" does sound like a pretty good name to name things after.
He even got a metal named after him ;-) Tungsten is called „Wolfram“ in German.
He's like an actually smart version of Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Arrogant, egotistical and dismissive but at least he has real math chops.
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...
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> “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?
It's a mild takedown in the set of all Wolfram slams. See, for example: A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity (2002) http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ I met Wolfram some 20 years before that review when he was on a world tour promoting the earliest iterations of Mathematica, the first iteration post his symbolic differentation work. This was the period when cellular automata, Mandelbrot…
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I 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.
> 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&o... ).
He 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.
He records every aspect of his life -- even design meetings. You can watch it all here: https://livestreams.stephenwolfram.com/
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Mathematica has half-billion+ in annual revenue and has been a mainstay of engineering work for decades. So ... this world?
Alright, I'm gonna need a source cited on that one lmao. Absolutely no way.
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Well it's an employee-owned company. Your data is as good as mine. You assert that Wolfram's work is worth less than $1billion. You're quite emphatic about that fact. Let's just do some back-of-the-napkin math to assess if your premise has any validity. Mathematica has been around for over 40 years. It has 1600+ employees. Tell me, how could a private company make payroll for 1600 top earners without hundreds of mill…
Existence doesn't guarantee profitability - they may have investors with a lot of patience and deep pockets. After 40 years, they should indeed turn a nice profit, but I'm not sure if it brings in billions. Many people see their product as educational software.
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Feynman never needed to tell you how smart he was, it just flowed out naturally as he talked about things in his beautiful clear way.
Disagree on Feynman. He seemed extraordinarily invested in showing off and self-mythologizing.
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> “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?
I 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" t…