The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Stephen Wolfram celebrates 35 years of Mathematica, originally launched on June 23, 1988, starting with a look at V1 of Mathematica on a Mac SE/30. The live demonstration (part 1) is followed by a discussion (part 2) covering the development and timeless nature of Mathematica, as well as answering viewer questions. This podcast episode is an audio recording from a video livestream, and some of the topics discussed may reference visual examples that are not available in this audio format. Watch the original livestream on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HxWg8exJxNY

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: Have you ever owned a pet? Is there any animal you've ever wanted as a pet, even if it wasn't a typical one, like a Komodo dragon? - Fall weather is here! Is there a season or time of year where you are more/less productive as an effect of the weather? - I went swimming today-about 100x better than walking. - I've only come across one joke in the Wolfram Language documentation, but I did find it quite funny and in good taste. Based on context, I think Jonathan Gorard wrote it. What do you make of this? - What is your history with/view on science fiction (books, movies, etc.)? - How important it is to save money vs. to spend it? How do you understand on what things it is worth spending money? - Well, I quit smoking, so I'm using that money on the lottery instead. - When is a technology mature enough to be "trusted" (i.e. autonomous driving)? - What are your views on making very powerful and trained open-source AI models like Stable Diffusion illegal vs. allowing them to exist? "OpenAI" or open-source AI? - How do you feel about making your email address public as a famous person? - How did you originally generate funding to start your company? - How do you choose whether to throw a project in the trash or not? Sometimes you invest so much of yourself in something that it just feels impossible to do so. - What are general tips you have as far as educating people?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Is there any scientific approach to simulate society? What are the main laws in sociology? - Property rights are a very basic element of a society. They lead to saving, then specialization, then trade, then currency. - Why are some physical constants dimensionless?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: You recently talked about relearning the history of thermodynamics. Can I ask for resources for learning the history of thermodynamics? - Can you talk about the history of mathematical/computational linguistics (the one that studies the principles and regularities of natural languages)? There are famous Soviet mathematicians (Andreev, Sobolev, Kantorovich, Markov - son of his great father) of Kolmogorov's school who advanced this field in the 1950s through the 1970s. - What do you think about the science of statistics? Is AI just computational Statistics? - What's the most exciting thing about the AI art revolution taking place now? Was there ever a time like it? - What did Henri Poincaré think about the infinities considered by Cantor, Hilbert and Zermelo? Do engineers need the concept of a complete infinity?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: How do tornadoes form? - Why does a fan create white noise? - Is that how they produced the audio from our galaxy's supermassive black hole? - Fans also generate a different speed of flow radially, as the linear speed is lower closer to the center of the blades than the outside. - I think they were actually to measure distortion in gas. - I thought they were synthetic, but it seems like they managed to actually measure sound waves in distant gas. - Why are roads made of tarmac?-  Is there anything certain modern physics can say about dark matter/energy? What exactly is it? - Does dark matter interact with gravity? - If dark matter particles exist, then why are there no dark matter halos associated with our Sun and with the planet Jupiter? - What's a graviton?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: What's your rule of thumb for launching a product (for yourself and for others)? Minimum viable product? Quantum of utility? Other? - How did you deal with the boring aspects of developing a product (e.g. marketing, sales) when you didn't have people to delegate to? - Would the academic environment be a place where a researcher and inventor could pursue their own research, or at least make some profit from developing patents and designs? I am in the US, just about to start a master's, and am considering starting a PhD in materials science. - How do you think Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) will evolve as candidates increasingly try to "trick" them by using keywords in their resumes?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Did any ancient unit systems use base 10, or did they all use more easily dividable bases like 12, 20, 60, etc.? - What is the history of design patterns in software engineering? How did people come to them? - Did you ever meet Niklaus Wirth, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Alan Kay and/or Paul Allen? - Have Julia sets and Fatou sets played a significant role in the development of computer programming languages? - Agreed. Computer programming languages should be object oriented for the language and structure to make sense instead of coming off as abstract and convoluted, and also so they are easier to work with and learn. - Did eighteenth-century engineers/craftsmen make use of the paradigm of Newtonian mechanics? - Why is it that Isaac Newton spent most of his time trying to prove theological ideas? - When will Moore's law expire? Apple announced four-nanometer chip technology, and there has to be a limit. - I wonder whether the future will be multicomputational, but to be honest, computers nowadays are more than powerful enough for the average user.

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: Stephen knows and remembers so much! Any hints on memory techniques and how to learn in general, and especially in math and physics as an adult? - ​What do you think of shifts in perspective as a source of discoveries in science? Is there any place for discoveries based on questioning the status quo? - Of the smartest people you have had a chance to communicate with, who stands out the most and why? - ​How do you spend money in a wise way? Do you have some heuristics? - What technology would you keep away from your children, and for how long? - What might be the best investment opportunities over the next 20 years? - Someone said if you hear good reviews of your product from other people, then you have succeeded. If you don't hear any feedback from others, that is usually a bad sign. - You mentioned investing in ideas. What is your metric for investing in an individual with an idea? For instance, are the Wolfram Winter and Summer Schools places for you to find those people to invest in? - Is there any technological innovation that you are anticipating or hoping is coming in the next few years? - What was it like handling the business side of things, being a creator? Was it something you liked or just did out of necessity? Was it hard or easy? - Did you do it all yourself, get help or just hire someone else more savvy and in the know to do it entirely? - ​What are techniques for developing intuition, in particular when working with really abstract concepts like those found in math, physics or even business?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: If we had discovered combinatory logic before statistical mechanics, what else might have ensued? - I've been wondering why Stephen didn't explore chess in his paper on games. Maybe he could discuss the history of chess AI. - Can we design a better game somehow? Do you think it's regrettable that the history of science and technology is almost never taught? - Political and social history seem absurdly dominant. The history of science and technology mostly focuses on the results and consequences of discoveries instead of the background of the characters behind them. - In the history of science and technology, have you ever seen something really unexpected? Like someone pulling something out of their hat with no prior experience? - A surprising event is when someone is an expert in field A, but somehow finds an "isomorphism" with field B and makes a discovery in field B. - I feel like Einstein's thought experiments were up there... like how did he think to follow a beam of light? - ​I think intuition is very underrated in science. But why does our intuition even work? - Will we ever get a philosophical programming language? - What do you think about the relationship of philosophical thinking and experimental mathematics? - The limits of reason and the limits of Turing machines? - ​​It seems in the history of science and technology that the "hard research" is usually kept out of the public eye. Mr. Wolfram, has it been beneficial or overwhelming having your work open to the public?  

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Why are there still mysteries in our knowledge of the human body in spite of exponential advancement in our understanding? - What are the approximate odds that two people have had the same fingerprint pattern? (odds of a collision among all fingerprints within the enumeration of the parameter space of fingerprint patterns) - Isn't the finger prints a two dimensional reminiscent from the torus like inversion that occurs in the body? - Is there a way to make trees grow faster? - If there exists a machine code for our bodies. Is the model you're working on some kind of a debugger? Could you explain the things you expect to be able to predict with your theory? - So conscious is like user space code and unconscious is like kernel space code? - How far away are we from finally doing away with physical smartphone screens and replace them with virtual projected screens in front of the user, which can be made as big or as small as one desires? - MIT developed AlterEgo reading your mind so you do not need to type. - Ed Fredkin - Tablet PCs didn't take off in the 90s but much later. Why? - Is typing/writing a bottleneck on productivity? I wonder if thought typing will have a significant effect on how much most people get done. - Thanks for that answer[Ellipsis]I guess for now we will just have to keep getting excited every time someone comes up with yet another smartphone with a slightly bigger (by a few mm) screen! - What if somebody falls asleep in front of his computer with the electrodes still on their heads and starts dreaming, then typing in his/her dreams? - If you drink MILK before u go to sleep you will remember YOUR DREAMS. There's some bio chemical there - Dreams are so interesting... from the habit of having a dream journal (writing them down as soon as you wake) triggers you to 'remember' the dream. But who's to say it's an accurate memory, or just an on demand created thought - How come that we sometimes experience more subjective time in a dream than actually has passed? Does our brain somehow "outruns" the normal computation rate? - What do think about molecules (supplements) that increase synaptic plasticity which controls how effectively two neurons communicate with each other I look for molecules to boost my brain power? - But what is a memory really? Where does one memory start and another end? What is the boundary between the "interior" and "exterior" of the mind? - The human brain does seem to have a bias towards discrete categorization though, e.g. the alternating illusions, Yanny/Laurel effect. - Companies into AI (like Tesla) put a lot of emphasis on 'vision' over other sensory detection. Is that also true for us as human beings? Are some senses 'more important'?