History of Science & Technology Q&A (September 18, 2024)

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: Why is history important? - History is very good at preventing humanity from making the same mistakes. - How would you explain the history of pi? - Do we know why Brahmagupta came up with the rules for arithmetic and algebra with zero and negative quantities? His book does appear to be a discontinuous jump in understanding. - Do you know if there was any physical reason that the Greek "elements" were associated with particular geometric shapes? - The Pi Day thing is great; I think I might get a shirt. - To what extent did your own path/work intersect the heydays of Bell Labs and notable people therefrom? - Did you ever use an Amiga computer? - With mobile devices we are basically going back to terminals. - ​​I used to have a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 sitting on my desk for AutoCAD and 3D modeling. Those were great machines and fun times! - Speaking of McCarthy and those days, do you think that sticking to s-expressions as opposed to m-expressions and Wolfram Language-style ones impeded Lisp's adoption historically?

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.