Episode 41: Stephen Wolfram, Founder & CEO of Wolfram Research, Computing the Cosmos - a podcast by Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination
from 2020-04-23T23:33
Stephen Wolfram, Founder & CEO of Wolfram Research, Creator of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, Author of A New Kind of Science, discusses computational science, his new Project to Find a Fundamental Theory of Physics, and more. Over the course of 4 decades, Stephen Wolfram has pioneered the development & application of computational thinking. He has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions & innovations in science, technology, and business. In this wide-ranging interview with Brian Keating @DrBrianKeating , Wolfram discusses his decades in-the-making Wolfram Physics Project, his career, his philosophy & approach to science, his hoped-for legacy, and questions from the audience including whether mathematical beauty matter at all, or is it just falsifiability?
We also discuss his books A New Kind of Science (2002), Idea Makers (2016) and Adventures of a Computational Explorer (2019). Show notes and resources available here:
Topics discussed in this in-depth interview:
The Impact of Computers on his life 00:12:18
Prime Numbers 00:15:25
What he thinks he’s good at doing 00:20:49
#WolframAlpha 00:21:30
The work he and his son did on creating a language for #ArrivalMovie 00:32:38:26
The first alien intelligence is really AI! 00:38:58
thoughts on #2001ASpaceOdyssey from his blog post 00:44:50
Cellular Automata & Complexity (1994) 00:54:50
Doom for the “Simulation Hypothesis” Thanks to the Physics Project 1:00:00
A New Kind of Science 01:14:54
Adventures of a Computational Explorer 02:06:39
How Steve Jobs convinced him to use ‘Mathematica’ instead of Wolfram Omega 02:32:02
Wolfram was educated at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech. He published his first scientific paper at the age of 15, and received his PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech at the age of 20. Wolfram’s early scientific work was mainly in high-energy physics, quantum field theory & cosmology. Having started to use computers in 1973, Wolfram rapidly became a leader in the emerging field of scientific computing, and in 1979 he began the construction of SMP—the first modern computer algebra system—which he released commercially in 1981.
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