History of Science & Technology Q&A (May 4, 2022)

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: Can you discuss the thinking process of the discovery of complex numbers, quaternions and octonions? - Can you go over the history of Grothendieck? What lead to the homotopy hypothesis? - Can you talk about the history of four-function calculators? - Could you tell us when cybersecurity was considered an important topic in computer science? - I bet one of the first major applications of cybersecurity was for the telephone system, which was essentially a giant computer that people started hacking to make free long-distance calls in the 1960s. - If nature is fundamentally computational, then what are the bugs in nature? - Can you talk about Steve Jobs's NeXTSTEP approach to software? Does it have an ongoing legacy? - In the Netherlands, if you dial #31# before the phone number, the other person won't see your phone number, so these things still exist. - So is evolution a bug or a feature?

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.