ED Surge

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

Math professor Martin Weissman is rethinking how his university teaches calculus. Over the summer, the professor from the University of California at Santa Cruz, spent a week at Harvard to learn how to redesign the mathematics for life sciences courses his institution offers. CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

Math 356

Math Calculus Algebra Mathematics 356

Stephen Wolfram

OCTOBER 27, 2023

It’s a new paradigm—that actually seems to unlock things not only in fundamental physics, but also in the foundations of mathematics and computer science , and possibly in areas like biology and economics too. You know, I talked about building up the universe by repeatedly applying a computational rule. Which starts here.

Computer 134

Computer Physics Mathematics Achievement 134

Stephen Wolfram

SEPTEMBER 23, 2021

It wasn’t long before I realized something fundamental: that this was at its core a computational phenomenon. It seemed as if there was a vast new domain that had suddenly been made accessible to scientific exploration. But it really wasn’t physics, or computer science, or math, or biology, or economics, or any known field.

Computer 55

Computer Mathematics Science Sciences 55

Stephen Wolfram

FEBRUARY 3, 2023

Once one has the idea of “equilibrium”, one can then start to think of its properties as purely being functions of certain parameters—and this opens up all sorts of calculus-based mathematical opportunities. But now the computation is “less dense”, and seemingly more accessible to human interpretation.

Computer 92

Computer Energy Physics Construction 92

Stephen Wolfram

FEBRUARY 14, 2023

It’s not obvious that it would be feasible to find the path of the steepest descent on the “weight landscape” But calculus comes to the rescue. As we mentioned above, one can always think of a neural net as computing a mathematical function—that depends on its inputs, and its weights.

Computer 145

Computer Architecture Mathematics Construction 145

Stephen Wolfram

MARCH 7, 2022

But beginning a little more than a century ago there emerged the idea that one could build mathematics purely from formal axioms, without necessarily any reference to what is accessible to sensory experience. From a computer science perspective, we can think of it as being like a type hierarchy.

Mathematics 120

Mathematics Physics Computer Algebra 120

Stephen Wolfram

AUGUST 22, 2023

It didn’t help that his knowledge of physics was at best spotty (and, for example, I don’t think he ever really learned calculus). “Lick” Licklider —who persuaded Ed to join BBN to “teach them about computers”. The article said that the “MAC” stood either for “Multiple Access Computer” or “Machine-Aided Cognition”.

Computer 67

Computer Physics Science Sciences 67