The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Stephen Wolfram presents the opening keynote for the 2021 Wolfram Summer School live to this years students across the globe! Get a taste of what it's like to engage in our annual summer programs, to find out more see the full list of our Education programs: https://education.wolfram.com/programs/

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Any stories about your work for Thinking Machines? - ​c/c++ have # omp parallel for loop parallelization, but there's nothing quite for distributed variable storage - Have you seen those Combinator Graph reduction Machines? - Have you read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", "What Do Care What Other People Think?" and/or "Tuva or Bust!"? - nowadays every modern computer has a connection machine, in the form of a GPU - f course Stephen knows the person who started the internet archive haha! - Were there applications for the connection machine which used the interconnections? I think e.g. fluid dynamic is easy to implement with the vector computation of GPUs, only local neighbors

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 does the Bloomberg Terminal work? - Did that guy find his satellite by the way? or did it just float off into space or lose power? - What are Feynman Diagrams? - How do holograms work and why don't we have more holographic technology? - Have you read "The Deep Learning Revolution:" (2018, MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski? - How closely do you follow the field of AI? - Is it possible, with quantum tunnelling, that eventually, long in the future, the universe will have mostly, or even a large proportion of, 'iron stars'? How would iron stars affect planets with iron cores orbiting these stars?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business and innovation as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: What's your hottake on the gamestop saga? - What's the most innovative prototype you've been shown that you're surprised didn't make it to market [or failed]...and do you know why? - What business concerns does the R&D process entail? What is the process of inventing your own algorithm from scratch? How many algorithms in Mathematica were just created in house by wolfram research? - Hi Dr. Wolfram, why does wealth inequality exist and is it necessary for a society to work well? Also will all this matter if we become immortal - Do you think your brain worked better when you were 20 or when you were 50? - Jason Fried always talks about getting good at the individual skill of making money. Can you tell us what you've learned about the skill of making money over the years? - What advice can you provide an entrepreneur who has lost their high tech business of 15 years due to bankruptcy. How can one overcome the emotional baggage of such a loss. - Hi Stephen! You are obviously a man who has created a way to dive into a specific subject with great depth. How do you recommend that people keep their focus when it's easy to be distracted? - I rarely finishes my projects. pls help me. Business sounds boring. I just want to do innovation and research. I think maybe business could be a consequence of a new innovative idea and successful project or something. Of course I could be a business person in the real world, since my projects/innovations are hobby and personal based. - Is the fact that a lot of companies are pre-revenue (and some large companies don't even have a viable revenue stream) indicate a tech bubble? - How did you deal with issues regarding scaling your systems as Wolfram grew? - What's your take on the emerging space industry? Would you encourage/advise enterprises in that field? - How to make someone fund for any company at ideation level? - I have heard silicon valley investor's opinion that the best businesses begin operations in areas in which they are the only ones or part of a few, but with an horizon of big growth. Do you think math is in this horizon of growth, or is commited to a limit that paces the rate of growth in math and numerical analysis tools and solutions? - You wrote on computational contracts some time ago. Is that on hold due to the physics project?

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: What's that nested circular artifact on the shelf behind you (next to the spikey)? what math concept could it be used to teach? - Does the pattern of shell formation have a mathematical 'scheme'? - Do you think lifeforms have a baseline program that is informed and "coded" by our environment and experiences? if so is that baseline program evolving over generations or is it hard wired? - Epigenetics if you don't chew on hard food for hundreds of years your jaws will get small your teeth will be crooked you'll have trouble breathing at night Etc - How did butterflies with their 4-stage life cycle evolve, where only the last stage is capable of reproducing? - How do bean plants find their poles to climb up? - How would you recommend developing a work ethic to get into science and technology as someone who is younger and a beginner? - Why don't trees or plants resonate and break in high winds like tall buildings or towers?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Did you ever meet any of the Manhattan project spies? (Theodore Hall, Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn May) - ​Did you have any interactions with Aaron Swartz? - Is it possible that while moving from the 20 original equations used by Maxwell to the 4 we use today we treated something as negligible by mistake because quantum theory was not around? - Did you meet Elon Musk or Steve Jobs? - What did you do and who did you meet at the Institute for advanced study (did not realise you went there until reading your article about Tini Veltman). - If you make fundamental breakthroughs in Homotopy type theory I bet IAS would be very interested - Did you meet any person related to the "Human Genome project"? Eric Lander, Craig Venter...? - Did you interact with Claude Shannon? - The french composer Erik Satie would only eat white food too - Any anecdotes about Ed witten or Leonard Susskind? - Are you familiar with the work of Roy Frieden about Physics from Fisher Information? What do you think about it? - What's a good place to get one genome sequenced? - Do you know how Joseph Fourier developed the math that lead to Fourier transformation? - ​IAS was the perfect place for Kurt godel Did you read godels Citizenship hearing? He pointed out logical inconsistencies in the American Constitution - Could you give us Feynman and Steve Jobs couple of anecdotes? - The Book "Faster than thought" (1953) has the following Leibniz quote "It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used". It seems that you have the same opinion as Leibniz.

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: In addition to keystrokes, do you monitor your words spoken? - Does your system record all your passwords? - How do vaccines work? - If a disease is such that the thing which kills is the immune response itself could a vaccine based on these principles be actually dangerous? - Have you ever met Tim Berners-Lee, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Feigenbaum, and/or Shafi Goldwasser? - Stephen Wolfram, my 3 years old sister told me that she doesn't likes math, and doesn't want to play with science with me, what can I do to change her mind? - What are time crystals? Do they become ordinary space crystals when moving very fast? - Do we have explanation why people have sense of discreteness (symbols, objects and such). Is world implicitly discrete or we just perceive it that way? - Can't we upload all the data about the human body and fix everything. We have computing power and A.I to classify why don't we understand it? - Has anyone looked at the complexity of a cell? can we not say that it exhibits intelligence? can intelligence exist without brains?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business and innovation as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: What company would you start today if you grew up during these times? - How much do you think your high scores in school/college influence your employees or your new employees? - When do you decide to release a product, assuming that you never feel like something is ever completely "done" or "perfect" - How would someone who picked an education that didn't provide worthwhile skills and connections catch up? - You value culture and flexibility why do you need to grow your team? Is it just not possible to outsource (via open source) a large amount of work to the people? - What business principles are of the greatest utility yet are never addressed in university programs or courses? - Do you think the current trend of high-value tech IPOs is reminiscent of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s? - What education do you need to receive to be able to research markets and design products if you are more from a technical side of things? - Is it difficult to fire people? - ​Do you think that with increasing power of monopolies, small tech start ups will still be able to held up? - Is publicity magic, does it just happen, or is it well thought out some way? - Are there any planned "wolfram ventures" startups that people can join and work for equity? - Do you use version control in your company?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series. Questions include: Have you studied the Crick-Mitchison theory of REM sleep? Do you think that their theory is relevant to artificial intelligence and/or the theory of pattern recognition? - Thoughts on the significance of the triangle and why it seems to be one of if not the strongest 2d shape? - Are quasicrystals useful? - What does it mean to map a brain? Why is there a race to map the brain correctly? See the full Q&A video playlist: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Discussing the history of LISP - Do you know Noam Chomsky personally? - NASA became interested in sanskrit as a programming language - Why did Ludwig Boltzmann commit suicide? - What's your take\opinion on Visual Programming Languages? - How is emacs related to lisp? - Do you know Linus Torvalds? - ​What are the main contributions of Marvin Minsky to AI field? - In a recent Lex Fridman Podcast (#153) Dmitry Korkin talked about how Joshua Lederberg, in the 60s, used advanced ideas in AI to help NASA identify molecules which might be related to alien life. - If you had to only choose one countries mathematics that you were allowed to use which would it be. England, France or Germany? - Did you interact with James Watson or Francis Crick? - Do you apply the Monte Carlo simulation in any of your work? - Did you ever meet Konrad Zuze or study his work? - Meet any Rocket scientists? Von Braun?