Stephen Wolfram Q&A
Submit a questionSome collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram
Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.
People
(11)May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What other scientists or researchers, past and present, do you admire most?
Well, one might think this was a very subjective question… but perhaps there’s a way to answer it, at least in part, by pure data mining…
Let’s look at the list of people referenced in the NKS book: https://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/index/names/
Now just count the mentions (with Mathematica of course)… and here are the winners: Alan Turing (19); Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What was it like working with Richard Feynman?
Richard Feynman and I had rather different styles of solving problems … so there was often a certain amount of “I don’t understand what you’re talking about” on both sides. We worked on quantum computing back around 1982 or so. He did hand calculation which I could never believe got the right answer, Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What are your thoughts on Elon Musk?
He’s always fun to talk to … and we’ve been having some interesting exchanges about AI of late. I have to relate one amusing story, though. A few years ago I was at a dinner party with my oldest son (who was then about 15), and my son happened to be sitting away from me but near Elon. Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
If Turing had died before publishing his seminal Turing machine paper in the 1930s, how much would this have delayed the construction of digital computers?
Interesting question. The idea of universal computation actually arose at about the same time in three places: Gödel’s “general recursive functions”, Turing’s “Turing machines”, and Church’s “lambda calculus”. It turned out that all these formulations are equivalent, and that was actually known pretty quickly. But Turing’s one is much easier to understand, Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
Everyone likes to point out the scientific inconsistencies in sci-fi movies & TV shows (e.g., completely ignoring the laws of physics). But what do filmmakers miss when they portray scientists and innovators themselves?
I’m often quite shocked at how bad the portrayals of science are even in high-budget movies. Sometimes I can see that getting the science wrong is necessary in order to have the story work. But often the bad science seems to be quite gratuitous. And I have to believe that for extremely little extra effort there’d be an extra market for these movies etc. Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
In writing about all of these intelligent people, did you notice any environmental factors which may have contributed to their success?
Interesting question. Richard Feynman always used to tell me that he thought “peace of mind” was a critical prerequisite to doing creative work. But certainly not everyone in the book had that when they were doing their most important work. And actually I think if there’s one theme I noticed it’s that external stimuli and external constraints often seem to play a crucial role. Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
Who in your book Idea Makers do you relate to most? Or who do you think is most like you, and why?
Difficult question. In terms of the things I’ve been interested in, Alan Turing and Gottfried Leibniz are probably the closest. But in terms of personality, they were very different from each other, and, I think, from me. I’m basically a “long projects” person: I work on projects for decades (Mathematica, Wolfram Language, Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
How much commonality is there between legendary mathematicians/scientists from ages ago, say from 1816, and more modern scientists? Would those legendary scientists from centuries past be significantly changed if they were brought up in this more modern environment?
Yes, things have certainly changed a lot from 1816 to 2016. (Note that the book does include quite a few recent people too.)
One important practical feature is that people are on average living longer. Ada Lovelace and Ramanujan, for example, would almost certainly have lived decades longer with modern healthcare. Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
Apparently you did a talk at Y Combinator in its early days. Any particular memories of Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian and Aaron Swartz when they were young?
I did do a talk, and even went to the very first Demo Day. As it happens, I was there with my then-10-year-old precociously-business-oriented son … and he kept a scorecard of the companies. His best pick was a company called Kiko, that was a calendar system. I almost invested in that. Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
Do you have a story about Steve Jobs, and how he helped in naming Mathematica?
Steve was… I started interacting with him pretty soon after we had very early versions of Mathematica because he was going to bring out this NeXT computer and it was oriented towards education. We made this deal early on to bundle what would be called Mathematica on the NeXT computer so everybody who got a NeXT could use Mathematica. Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
Did Steve Jobs ever try to explain math or physics to you?
No, I don’t think so. It turns out I know somebody who knew Steve in high school. The person who I know who knew Steve in high school is now a physicist. I actually saw him recently at Washington. He was like, “Yeah, Steve was always kind of a weird person in high school. Read more