History of Science and Technology Q&A for Kids and Others (February 24, 2021)

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: I am interested in the evolution of mechanics from Newton through d'Alembert to Lagrange. Could you elaborate on this? Why was it the Europeans that created the modern mathematical framework and not the Chinese? They obviously had a head start. Why don't we use Chinese characters instead use the Latin alphabet? Pascal's Triangle was known in China before Europe—Sounds a little bit like computer graphics programming competitions in the early 90s (was quite popular in Scandinavia). Math competitions in logic might have been a similar thing—for example in Poland, but who knows. There's an obvious problem with peer reviewed academic research. Is there anything in the way science was developed in the past that we can learn from? Were we better at peer reviewing science?

Om Podcasten

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of nearly 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. On his podcast, Stephen discusses topics ranging from the history of science to the future of civilization and ethics of AI.