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.
Software Technology
(63)January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
What does developing a programming language “for its own sake” mean?
If you ask yourself, “What are the languages that have a chance in the next century?” there aren’t very many of them. And I think that Mathematica has more than a chance. That means that we have an example of a language that has pretty modern ideas—it is certainly a big step beyond C and Fortran—and that is already widely used today. Read more
January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
You’ve considered “making a thing that will probably be called M, that is essentially Mathematica without the mathematics”. But how seriously?
We’ve built little Ms. There is no doubt that Mathematica without the mathematics will exist one day. The main issue for us is to figure out how it makes sense to distribute the thing. Right now there are particular application areas where people have written programs in Mathematica that don’t use the mathematical side of Mathematica, Read more
January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
What are the virtues of symbolic languages like Mathematica vs. procedurally based languages like Basic?
When you’re working with a procedurally based numerical language, there’s a lot of mysterious hidden state associated with what’s happening. For example, you have a standard program written in C, and you have various data structures, and you have subroutines that call each other and pass pointers to these data structures. Read more
January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
When you were first testing your ideas for Mathematica in SMP, it would have been about the time Clocksin and Mellish were bringing Prolog to a wider audience with their book. Were you influenced by Prolog at that time?
No, actually I wasn’t. I had never written a program in Prolog. I’d read the manual. The main thing that I was trying to do was to imitate what seemed to be what happens when you do mathematical calculations; that is, that you are continually applying rules of mathematics. The transformation-rule model has not been widely adopted. Read more
January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
How did SMP influence Mathematica?
One of the ideas I had in SMP was, “Figure out a good programming paradigm and just stick to it”. This was a mistake. I think it’s not a trivial mistake. You might think, “If there is a natural way to specify how programs should work, that maybe hooks into some way that has to do with how the brain processes ideas about things, Read more
February 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
Do you have any opinions on the dominant paradigms of today, and about which will survive into the next decade?
I think the transformational-rule paradigm is working fairly well. I think the functional paradigm is largely working well. I think the procedural paradigm sucks, basically. I think the fundamental problem with it is there’s much too much hidden state in the procedural paradigm. You have these weird variables that are getting updated and things that are happening that you can’t see. Read more
February 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
So one rationale behind procedural programming is that it’s easy to learn. But one rationale for a hidden state is an optimization of some sort. Why do you think people don’t need optimization anymore?
There are very few programs that are written for the first time where execution speed is an issue. When you’re running your word processor, you don’t want the scrolling to be slow, but that’s a different point. If you look at the history of programming-language design, almost every major screw-up is a consequence of people pandering to some optimization, Read more
February 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
What are your thoughts on parallel processing and its relation to language?
One of the questions is, are there paradigms that are applicable to parallel programming that aren’t applicable to sequential programming, and what are they? Functional programming, list-based programming, things like that are readily applicable to parallel systems. In fact, they work very nicely and elegantly in parallel systems. That is indeed the main algorithm that is used in the various [parallel] Fortrans. Read more
March 1, 1993
From: Interview by Paul Wellin, Mathematica in Education
The early computer algebra systems—Macsyma, SMP, etc.—were they used purely as research tools or was there some notion that they might be used in the classroom also?
At that time it was not really practical to think of using these things in the classroom. SMP was built to run on the then-emerging class of mini-computer systems such as VAXes, and VAXes were in the multi-hundred-thousand-dollar price range, so it wasn’t realistic to think of those things being used in a serious way in the classroom.
March 1, 1993
From: Interview by Paul Wellin, Mathematica in Education
I noticed a rather long debate on the nets recently about the current “role” of Mathematica. Some people were arguing that presentation features should not be focused on—that all work should go into algorithm improvement. I am sure that a similar argument could be put forth about the Mathematica language itself as well. What is your view of its present role?
In terms of algorithm development, I am really very satisfied with the point we’re at and the rate at which things are progressing. My big test for these things in terms of, for example, algebraic algorithms is to be able to clearly say that if there is an integral you can think about doing, Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
The reception of the Mathematica system in the mathematical community has on occasion raised unexpectedly high feelings, and has sometimes appeared to take on the dimensions of a zealot’s war of disparagement against hype. Do you have an explanation for this fairly unique occurrence? What is your view of the matter?
I’m not quite sure what you mean. Any successful enterprise will have its detractors—that’s just the way the world works. I guess mathematicians can sometimes get a little more righteously out of control than other folk—witness the Unabomber. But I think that considering the level of success we’ve had, there have been surprisingly few detractors—even in mathematics.
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
You have been working on a book about science for some time. Can you sketch some of your ideas? Are there implications for symbolic computation and symbolic computation systems?
Well, that’s a whole other discussion. What I’m trying to do is a pretty big thing: I’m trying to build a whole new way of thinking about science. If you look at most of science for the past three hundred or so years, there’s been a common theme all the way through: that nature should be somehow or another be described by mathematical equations. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
What has been in your view the most important effect of Mathematica since its release?
Basically that we’ve defined a whole new way for people to use computers—and that more than a million people have found out that it’s a good idea. For your audience, I’d say the most important thing is that lots and lots of people from all sorts of fields have now been exposed through Mathematica to issues about computers and mathematics—and have started to care about them. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
Where has Mathematica not met your expectations?
Technically I think Mathematica is great. I’m always thinking of more things to make it do, but I’m very happy with what’s there. One thing I guess I’m slightly disappointed about is that we don’t seem to have managed to communicate some of the intellectual advances in Mathematica as thoroughly as I’d like to people in areas like computer science and mathematics. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
Symbolic computation as a research discipline has an uneasy existence between mathematics and computer science. Will this change? What can be done to change it?
Gosh, I’m not sure exactly what you mean. I’m not a great fan of a lot of academic work that goes on these days. I think a lot of areas of academia have become incredibly introverted: people just write papers that other people in their fields will read. They don’t seem to care much about anything outside. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
In what areas of mathematics do you see an underdeveloped potential for computational methods? What could be done to encourage developments?
I think the opportunities of computer experiments are absolutely vast. It’s like the situation about three hundred years ago with physics experiments. Even the easy stuff hasn’t been done. I’ve spent some of the past 15 years trying to do a bunch of the easy computer experiments—and I’ve discovered some incredibly interesting things. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
One paradigm currently attracting interest is knowledge-based symbolic algorithms and computing. Do you see potential for this approach?
I’m afraid I don’t know what “knowledge-based symbolic algorithms” are. If that means programs with tables in, then yes, those are useful—especially when one has the pattern-matching capabilities of Mathematica. I wish academic computer scientists would use less jargon! It really gets fairly funny when people like me build big computer science systems but can’t remember the official names of the things they’re doing!
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
One discernible computational trend in networking is remote software: do you see consequences for symbolic computation systems?
MathLink has always been runnable over a network, and an increasing number of people are doing it. The advantages are mainly practical, but they’re significant.
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
Will parallelism—and systems which support it—be a decisive issue?
Not in the near future, I think. As you perhaps know, I was quite involved with massively parallel computing 10 or 15 years ago. As you also know, the marketplace for parallel computing never really happened. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The traditional general-purpose design of processors has too much market momentum behind it. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
Do you believe that any further major general-purpose symbolic computation systems could be successfully launched in the future?
You mean Mathematica competitors? It depends what you mean by “major”. If we don’t do anything really stupid, I think it’s unlikely anyone else will reach a million users in the foreseeable future. But the more successful we are, the more there’ll be people who’ll want to claim that they’re building systems that are like ours. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
One sees a multiplication of smaller specialized systems whose design is also increasingly sophisticated. What balance and relationship do you see in the future between specialized and comprehensive systems?
I guess the specialized systems that seem to me to make the most sense are the ones built in Mathematica. They start from all the stuff we’ve done, then add specialized abilities. I don’t know why there are so many people building specialized systems in languages like C. I guess it may conceivably make for a better story for an academic paper—though I’m not quite sure why—but I don’t think it’s a good use of effort. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
One strange aspect of symbolic computation is that the production of mathematical software is an almost invisible, unrecorded discipline. Do you have an explanation for this?
That’s true in almost any field that involves actually building things. We’ve always been very happy for software historians to come in and study our efforts. But almost nobody’s ever done it. And we ourselves are more interested in developing new technology than in writing academic papers and things about technology we’ve already developed.
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
The community has proponents of “free” software. Increasing numbers of researchers and better software engineering might make public domain systems increasingly serious contenders. What future do you see for the roles of free and commercial software?
Free software is fine when it doesn’t cost much to develop and support. But you can’t expect to have a really vital long-term product and make it free. What we see a lot with Mathematica packages is that the first versions are free: they’re made by one or two people at a university or some such. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
The use of symbolic computational tools in teaching is a controversial topic where transatlantic differences are particularly evident; what is your view on the matter?
I guess the use of calculators is controversial too. I think anything that’s new will be controversial, and will remain so until the people who didn’t grow up with it die off. I think it’s fairly obvious that having a tool available is better than not having it available. And certainly it looks to me as if some rather nice things have been done with Mathematica—and particularly with Mathematica notebooks—in the courseware area.
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin
Lisp was built on the tradition of the lambda calculus. When Prolog became popular a good dozen years ago, it also spawned a flurry of research into the semantics of logic programming. The evaluation model of Mathematica as a programming language is at least as complex and interesting: why has there been no comparable interest?
I’ve wondered that myself. There has been some work, but there could certainly be much more. Perhaps it’s another sign of the decay of academic computer science. After all, thinking about evaluation models is intellectually quite difficult, especially when there’s a real system out there to stop people being able to hide in pure formalism. Read more
September 30, 1996
From: Interview by Robers Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times
You started your design of Mathematica where most software developers end theirs—by writing a 1,395-page users’ manual. Why?
If you can’t explain it honestly in the manual, then you are probably making a mistake in the way it is designed and people will never be able to understand how it is ever going to work.
One of the things I found to be the most intellectually demanding in building big systems like Mathematica is this whole thing of starting from nothing and then having to build some kind of language and some kind of structure that a lot of people are going to live inside. Read more
October 30, 1996
From: Interview by Nick Turner, Investor's Business Daily
What’s the market for technical computing?
The kinds of people who need to calculate things span a surprisingly large range. And that range is an ever-increasing one. It started off with scientists and engineers. Now, it includes financial analysts, people in medical research, social sciences and life sciences. A lot of students also use it—from graduate school down to high school. Read more
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
What did you think about the computers in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Well, let’s talk about the ordinary ones—not HAL—for now. It’s really fascinating what was predicted correctly there, and what wasn’t. There was one definite major conceptual mistake, I think, that had to do with misassessing the power of software, and that pervaded a lot of the things that weren’t got right. Read more
February 6, 1998
From: Interview by David Stork, Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality
Have you yourself worked much on the problem of building intelligent machines?
Well, since you ask, I’ll tell you the answer is yes. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it in public before. But since you asked the right question: yes, I have been interested in the problem for a very long time—probably 20 years now—and have been steadily picking away at it. Read more
July 7, 2002
From: Interview by Loch Adamson, The New York Times
After A New Kind of Science, do you have a follow-up project planned?
I’ve been meaning to take a vacation for years, but I think I’m actually about to enter a tool-building phase again. I see a number of directions from the science that I’ve done, and one that I like rather a lot is approaches to fundamental physics, sort of trying to find a final, Read more
May 9, 2003
From: Interview by John Russell, Bio-ITWorld
Who is looking for primitives to use to describe biological systems, and how long will it take before we see tools that are based on them?
Not long at all. There are people working on it right now. You can just search in the space of all possible simple programs because there just aren’t that many of them. There might be a trillion of them. It’s not hard to search a space of a trillion simple programs. Read more
July 1, 2008
From: Interview by Luciano Floridi, Philosophy of Computing and Information: 5 Questions
What is the proper role of computer science and/or information science in relation to other disciplines?
Every discipline will inevitably become “computational”—and its methods and practice will become deeply infused with computation. I happen to have seen this personally over the past two decades as Mathematica and the computational capabilities it brings have spread through more and more fields.
Computation is crucial both to doing better what has been done before in other disciplines, Read more
July 1, 2008
From: Interview by Luciano Floridi, Philosophy of Computing and Information: 5 Questions
What do you consider the most neglected topics and/or contributions in late 20th-century studies of computation and/or information?
Computer and information science have tended to define themselves in a rather engineering-based way—concentrating on creating and studying systems that perform particular specified tasks.
But there’s a whole different approach that’s much closer to natural science: to just investigate the computational universe of possible programs, and see what’s out there.
One might have thought that most programs that one would encounter this way would not do anything very interesting. Read more
May 29, 2009
From: Interview by Monica Attard, ABC Local
Is Wolfram|Alpha another Google, a simple search engine? Or is it like a vast encyclopedia of sorts?
When you look up a term in the encyclopedia, you still have to go and read the paragraph about that term and you have to make sort of your own conclusions from the narrative text that’s written there.
The idea of Wolfram|Alpha is you have a specific question, you know: where will the Sun be at, Read more
May 29, 2009
From: Interview by Monica Attard, ABC Local
How important is it to you to identify sources on Wolfram|Alpha?
Well, I think our approach as you’re alluding to, it’s rather different from a search engine. A search engine is just saying, look we as the search engine, we’re not making any judgments about any of this information—we’re just giving you… you know, here are 10 links that you can go read and make your own judgment about them. Read more
May 29, 2009
From: Interview by Monica Attard, ABC Local
How do you access all those repositories of knowledge that you use in Wolfram|Alpha?
It’s been lots of work. I mean we had a foundation which was, in terms of the algorithmic side of things, had a system called Mathematica which we’ve been building and selling out there in the world for 23 years now. And that’s the platform from which Wolfram|Alpha is built.
In terms of the actual raw data about the real world, Read more
May 29, 2009
From: Interview by Monica Attard, ABC Local
Google is planning to launch a similar service to Wolfram|Alpha called Google Squared. Do you see it as similar?
I don’t really know enough about it. I mean, I think that what we’ve been doing here is a much more insanely ambitious project than I think anybody else really could seriously imagine at this point. I don’t really know about the details, but the general search engine concept tends to be you’re foraging information from the web and kind of using some purely automated algorithm to present that foraged information in some useful way. Read more
August 31, 2009
From: Interview by Kaustubh Katdare, CrazyEngineers
Could you give a brief overview of the algorithms that make Wolfram|Alpha work and produce great results?
It’s a big system! These days about 6 million lines of Mathematica code. It relies on a very large number of different algorithms and methods, a large fraction of which we’ve had to invent. In a sense it’s NKS that makes it possible: the paradigmatic idea that there can be fairly simple underlying programs that produce the rich and complex behavior we need. Read more
August 31, 2009
From: Interview by Kaustubh Katdare, CrazyEngineers
Where does Wolfram|Alpha get all its data? Does it crawl the Internet like web search engines?
We try to get data from the most definitive, authoritative, sources. Often the web is a good place to start in helping us identify those sources. But then we tend to go to them directly. Identifying the best sources is just the first step, though. Then we have to curate the data, Read more
August 31, 2009
From: Interview by Kaustubh Katdare, CrazyEngineers
Are the new rules of logic upon which computation can be based, radically different from conventional logic? Alternatively, is it an extension of conventional logic + something else?
Computation is ultimately about following rules—of any kind. Traditional logic represents just one class of rules. There are lots of others that can be used. One of the surprising discoveries from NKS is just how easy it is to find rules that can support universal computation. And that’s important if one wants to base computation on elements like molecules. Read more
August 31, 2009
From: Interview by Kaustubh Katdare, CrazyEngineers
How did you go about building Wolfram|Alpha? What were the design challenges and architecture of Wolfram|Alpha?
It’s a complicated project. Certainly it has many more “moving parts” than anything I’ve ever tried to do before. There’s the data side of it: building a pipeline to organize and expertly curate data from all different domains. Then there’s implementing all the methods and models that we know from science and other fields. Read more
August 31, 2009
From: Interview by Kaustubh Katdare, CrazyEngineers
What kind of infrastructure do you have to process all the data in Wolfram|Alpha?
We have several supercomputer-class clusters running Wolfram|Alpha. All of the code of Wolfram|Alpha is written in Mathematica. When you give an input, it gets handled by webMathematica, then parallelized through a version of gridMathematica.
January 5, 2010
From: Interview by Gregory T. Huang, Xconomy
From a technology standpoint, what’s next for Wolfram|Alpha?
In Wolfram|Alpha, a lot of what it works out is “old science” based. There is an existing model for such and such economic process [for example]. These models are based on equations and mathematical kinds of things. But can we not only compute on the fly, can we also invent and create on the fly? Read more
January 5, 2010
From: Interview by Gregory T. Huang, Xconomy
How mainstream will Wolfram|Alpha become, compared with search engines like Google or Bing?
These are complementary kinds of things. It’s like asking, how successful is science going to be in the world? It’s saying, what can you compute in the world? How could search engines become so important? When it becomes sufficiently easy to be a reference librarian hundreds of times a day.
I think the set of people for whom Wolfram|Alpha is useful is very broad. Read more
November 3, 2011
From: Interview by Mark Jannot, Popular Science
Is it fair to say that the fundamental aim of Wolfram|Alpha is to foster and democratize computational knowledge?
That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s the big effort. That’s the thing: Absent these various realizations, one might have thought that with computational knowledge, we’ll really not be able to get very far; it’s very specialized and won’t be able to be generally useful. And for me, that’s the big metadiscovery of the past two years: that at this time in history, Read more
November 3, 2011
From: Interview by Mark Jannot, Popular Science
The notion that all of our exponential growth curves in data gathering, storage and processing ability have delivered us to a real paradigm-shift moment in terms of how data can both help us to understand our world and to change it. Do you agree with that? And how does that dovetail with your own work with data and computation?
There are several different branches here. Let’s start with, when you say data, what are the sources of data in the world today? One source of data is people compiling data—census data, data on properties of chemicals. This is largely human-compiled data. What has happened today is that there are very large data repositories in lots of different areas. Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Mathematica, NKS, Wolfram|Alpha, what comes next? How are they all related and what is your criteria for choosing a project?
First, lots of combinations of those. There are some really interesting things emerging there.
I’m hoping one day to make a serious assault on finding the fundamental theory of physics. Perhaps that will be my next “very different” project.
How are all my projects connected? Well they all have in common that they involve taking some big hairy area and trying to break it down to find what’s essential, Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
Have you ever worked with APL or J or the K/Q programming languages, and what is your opinion of J especially—its usefulness in research, mathematics and industry and perhaps how it compares with Mathematica?
I haven’t personally used APL or J for production purposes, though I studied APL in detail when I was designing SMP, the forerunner of Mathematica. I thought APL had some really interesting ideas, some of which have shown up in Mathematica.
I actually gave the keynote at the APL annual conference in 1989. Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What can be done to improve natural language search algorithms? For example, this morning on Wolfram|Alpha I tried: “Time it takes to walk 500km” and it searched “time it”. “Time to walk 500km” and it searched for “walk”. “How long does it take to walk 500km” and it searched “how long does it take”. “Time taken to walk 500km at average human walking speed” and it searched “average human walking speed”.
An interesting question… very related to a blog post I recently wrote about “artificial stupidity”: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/04/overcoming-artificial-stupidity/
If we change your input e.g. to “Time it takes to go 500km at 2mph” then it works just fine.
And in fact I think the problem Wolfram|Alpha is having with your input is not so much to do with natural language understanding as such, Read more
January 8, 2013
From: Interview by Lars Mensel and Thore Barfuss, The European
Do we sometimes overestimate the power of computing?
One thing being discussed right now is the automated grading of student essays. A crazy idea! If that were to be implemented, people would soon learn how to write essays that are rather opaque to humans but will score really well with computers. It is equally mistaken as teaching people how to do calculus by hand. Read more
July 27, 2015
From: Interview by Byron Reese, Gigaom
What is the state of the technology? Have we built something as smart as a bird, for instance?
Well, what does it mean to make something that is as smart as X? In the history of artificial intelligence, there’s been a continuing set of tests that people have come up with. If you can do X, then we’ll know you’re as smart as humans, or something like that. Almost every X that’s been defined so far, Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What’s the biggest technological advancement that has helped your company?
Obviously we wouldn’t exist but for universal computation and the possibility of software….
I have always taken the point of view that I want to design a language the way it should be, independent of what happens to be easy to implement on computers with a particular level of power. It’s helped tremendously over the last 30 years that computers have kept on getting more and more powerful, Read more
November 7, 2016
From: Interview by Dingyu Chen, Eton Magazine
Will mathematicians need to learn classical mathematics (algebra, analysis, calculus) in the future if computers can do it for us?
Once one’s made something into a definite calculation, then, yes, one can just get a computer to do it. The challenge is in doing the mathematical thinking or computational thinking to get it to the point where it can be explained to a computer. And that’s the important thing for people to learn to do. Read more
November 7, 2016
From: Interview by Dingyu Chen, Eton Magazine
Your products so far have been wildly successful and crucial in the lives of many. Do you have any plans for future releases?
Of course! In early December you’ll see Wolfram|Alpha start letting you “open up the code” so you can take the Wolfram Language code it uses, and do your own computations with it. That will be important to lots of students, but it’s just a corner of our R&D efforts. We’ve been at this for 30 years now, Read more
November 7, 2016
From: Interview by Dingyu Chen, Eton Magazine
What first inspired you to create Wolfram|Alpha?
I was already thinking about making knowledge computable back when I was at Eton more than 40 years ago. For a long time I thought the only way to make a system like that would be to build something that basically emulates a brain. But as a result of a bunch of basic science I did in the 1990s, Read more
November 7, 2016
From: Interview by Dingyu Chen, Eton Magazine
What is it like programming and bringing a concept to life? Do you find it challenging and strenuous, or do you feel like you have the freedom to manage your own work?
I’ve spent about 40 years trying to make programming as automated as possible—so we humans basically get to tell computers what we want to achieve, then the computers figure out the grungy details of how to do it. The result is that for me programming is about turning ideas into reality as directly as possible. Read more
April 3, 2018
From: Interview by Harrison Tasoff, Space.com
How did 2001: A Space Odyssey affect the projects you’ve embarked on and the approach you took to them?
The notion of computers as visual things is probably something that I viscerally absorbed from 2001. Because at the time when 2001 came out, computers were absolutely not visual things. In the first computer I used, its only form of IO [input/ output] was a paper tape reader and punch and a tele-printer. Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
Do you think there will ever be a treatment for math disorders such as Dyscalculia, and how do you think software may be able to assist this effort?
When I was a kid I used to claim I was “math challenged” (well, I used different words because I spoke British English then). That was why I started building computer tools to help me … and eventually built Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, etc.!
Even before I’d built those tools, I was using computers to do math … Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
What’s an easy addition that would improve your infrastructure in the next year or two? Could you add some NLP to scan online papers and surface ones that, for example, relate to your current project(s)?
I’ve been experimenting with using our latest ML/NLP tools. One basic thing I’d like is to have a system that alerts me if a question I sent out in email didn’t get answered after a certain time. It’s a slightly tricky problem. A student at last year’s Wolfram Summer School made a decent “is it a question” Read more
March 4, 2019
From: Reddit AMA
What do you feel about complexity after 30 years of developing a system?
This is a confusing question for me, because I’ve worked a lot on complexity in science (and the launching of “complexity theory” back in the early 1980s etc.) But I’m guessing you mean: complexity of a software system.
It’s very important that Wolfram Language is based on a small number of powerful principles (e.g. Read more
November 4, 2019
From: Interview by Margaret Harris, Physics World
How is computing different from programming?
The key to computational language is to find a way to express whatever one wants to talk about in a form that a computer can understand. Programming languages are about starting from the underlying operations in a computer and working out how to tell the computer which operations to perform. A programming language has concepts like arrays or pointers. Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
How do you define computation?
What is computational thinking? As far as I’m concerned, it’s organizing your thoughts clearly enough that you can explain them to a sufficiently smart computer. That means if we’re saying… Here’s a type of problem that’s a computational thinking problem. Let’s say you’re given a point on Earth… given its latitude and longitude… Read more
December 18, 2019
From: Interview by Guy Kawasaki, Remarkable People Podcast
What is computational paradigm?
It’s thinking about things in computational terms, so thinking about… given a question, trying to formulate it with the kinds of thinking that you could talk to a smart computer about.
You have this giant display on your wall of a rhinoceros. I’m thinking about how do I make that rhinoceros computational? Read more