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How Did We Get Here? The Tangled History of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Stephen Wolfram

But he had a second hypothesis too—based, he said, on the ideas of “that most ingenious gentleman, Monsieur Descartes”: that instead air consists of “flexible particles” that are “so whirled around” that “each corpuscle endeavors to beat off all others”. Nevertheless, every insurance company places its faith in the calculus of probabilities.

Energy 88
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What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?

Stephen Wolfram

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. It turns out that the chain rule of calculus in effect lets us “unravel” the operations done by successive layers in the neural net.

Computer 145
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The Physicalization of Metamathematics and Its Implications for the Foundations of Mathematics

Stephen Wolfram

And if we’re going to make a “general theory of mathematics” a first step is to do something like we’d typically do in natural science, and try to “drill down” to find a uniform underlying model—or at least representation—for all of them. We can view these in some sense as the “observed phenomena” of (human) mathematics.