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.

Computer 135

Computer Physics Mathematics Achievement 135

Stephen Wolfram

SEPTEMBER 23, 2021

It wasn’t long before I realized something fundamental: that this was at its core a computational phenomenon. But it really wasn’t physics, or computer science, or math, or biology, or economics, or any known field. It’s important, by the way, to distinguish this from computer science. What is that science?

Computer 55

Computer Mathematics Science Sciences 55

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

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”. Nowadays we’d call it the trie (or prefix tree) data structure. But his name shows up from time to time.

Computer 68

Computer Physics Science Sciences 68