Stephen Wolfram Q&A

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Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

December 18, 2019

From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast

Who’s the smartest person you ever met?

I don’t rank people by smartness. You’ve got to realize the question of… if it was the case that everything that came up somebody else could figure out and then that everything you think about, somebody else is there in front of you, able to figure it out. Then you’d say, “Okay, that’s a smarter person than whatever”. I have to say, in my own life… Ever since I was in kindergarten… I happened to go to a kindergarten in Oxford, England, where there were a bunch of smart kids. I’ve always had this thought, “Eventually, I’m going to go to this place where I’m going to find all these people who are fundamentally smarter than me”. I went through different kinds of places: the fancy universities, Silicon Valley, this, that, whatever. I never had that moment where I said, “I’ve finally found the place where everybody is smarter than me”.

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