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Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

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Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#21

Post by jplusequalt »

max_ wrote: post #12

I 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 underst…

He comes off as very arrogant. Also, on more than one occasion he's tried to pass off others work as his own. The best of example of this is when he said he invented the field of cellular automata.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#23

Post by adamgordonbell »

So, 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.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#24

Post by martinky24 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #11
martinky24 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every genius who was right and ridiculed, and celebrated accordingly, there are many people who were wrong and ridiculed, and forgotten accordingly.

Those 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.

I assure you -- There's nothing wrong with ridiculing someone for being an asshole. How you interact with other people matters, like it or not.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#25

Post by FPGAhacker »

max_ wrote: post #12

I 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 underst…

I don’t find him insufferable but I also haven’t paid much attention to him.

From what I gather of other people’s comments, they are often bothered by his apparently pervasive discussion of himself and his life.

I’ve never met the man, but the few interviews I’ve see or read about him I thought were pretty interesting.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#26

Post by rcarmo »

rezmason wrote: post #4
martinky24 wrote: post #2

Wolfram is insufferable in short form -- imagine listening to him talk for 4 hours!

I 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.

I 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).

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#27

Post by lupire »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #23

So, 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-through…

Notation, 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)

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#29

Post by Shrezzing »

This 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.

Re: Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

#30

Post by FPGAhacker »

jplusequalt wrote: post #21
max_ wrote: post #12

I 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 underst…

He comes off as very arrogant. Also, on more than one occasion he's tried to pass off others work as his own. The best of example of this is when he said he invented the field of cellular automata.

Did he really say that? My quick search didn’t turn anything up.
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