5min chapter

#637: Stephen Wolfram — Personal Productivity Systems, Richard Feynman Stories, Computational Thinking as a Superpower, Perceiving a Branching Universe, and The Ruliad... The Biggest Object in Metascience

The Tim Ferriss Show

notes

CHAPTER

The Importance of Using Natural Language

The importance of computation is, it's another way to structure how you talk about the world. A big part of what I've spent my life doing is building this kind of computational language. It provides a precise way to take something like food or position on earth and represent those things computationally in a sort of precise way. And then the computer can help us to get further with that.

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Transcript

Episode notes

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Stephen Wolfram (@stephen_wolfram) is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; the originator of the Wolfram Physics Project; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of more than four decades, he has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions, and innovations in science, technology, and business.

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[06:58] How Stephen collects information for his vast personal archives.

[08:40] When a situation warrants building a matrix.

[12:31] Science sometimes makes us look far back to move incrementally forward.

[17:49] Befriending the computational.

[22:59] How technology helps us navigate natural language.

[32:30] How Stephen chose subjects for his book Idea Makers.

[35:09] On spending time with Richard Feynman.

[37:33] Thoughts on Srinivasa Ramanujan.

[39:57] When Stephen started solving science problems with computers.

[42:00] Heresies today, gospels tomorrow.

[50:14] Ruminations on the ruliad.