Wolframania

An Anonymous Coward writes "The New York Times has had a couple of articles about Stephen Wolfram in the last couple of weeks. Is he self-aggrandizing or brilliant? Or both? And is God a software engineer?" I thought our reader-contributed review of ANKOS was quite good.

Comments

His Website..

[routerwhore]

More insight on his website:
www.stephenwolfram.com

Another good article about his latest work: On Forbes

Re:So let me get this straight.

[guybarr]

being a physicist and therefore having no real clue of math

some theoretical-physics profs I know actually have VERY deep understanding of math, which they use in their work.

get to know the real masters, if you're smart as that mensa card implies, you'll understand how wrong was that remark.

Whaaaa? Re:So let me get this straight.

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

being a physicist and therefore having no real clue of math

That's sort of like saying, being a painter and having no real clue of paint. Archimedes? Newton? Maxwell? Laplace? Legendre? Einstein? It is no accident that major fields in mathematics have been opened up by ... wait for it ... physicists. It might be argued that physicists and their little problems have done more for the advancement of pure mathematics than all the scribblings of pure mathematicians. At the very least, an out-of-hand dismissal of physicists as, apparently, math-illiterates, is without justification.

Re:Whaaaa? Re:So let me get this straight.

[kuroth]

>How many of them actually do know how to
>actually make paint? Where would the Renaissance
>artists be without the guys who invented oil
>paints?

ah, there's nothing like a little uneducated blather.

Most artists made their own paints. Many of them still do today.

The guy credited with inventing modern oil paint was Jan van Eyck, an artist. Others were using oil paints before him, but he's widely credited with developing a stable oil-based varnish for use in them.

There were later improvements by others, such as the addition of lead oxide by Antonello da Messina, da Vinci's addition of beeswax, and Rubens's grinding techniques. All of those guys, in case you're completely clueless, were artists.

Think, then talk. It works better that way.

Kuroth

Sycophants?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's clear he surrounded himself with sycophants who couldn't (or wouldn't) tell him to trim this beast down. The book could easily be 1/4th its current size and deliver the same information.

I was one of the early reviewers of the book, I received an 'alpha' copy more than 1 year ago. Believe me, there was no 'surrounding with sycophants' here. It was written largely in isolation. Maybe 100 people got to see it when it was about 6 months away from the press. There was simply no way Wolfram was going to change it by then, and he knew that. I'm certain that he and his handlers were told of the controversial nature of the book, some of us echoed the annoying writing style comments as well. It really wasn't a concern as far as I was able to understand. The book had been incubating for 10+ years and it was time to fish-or-cut-bait.

I and others mentioned the excessive "me me me", lack of bibliographic material, starting every other sentence with a proposition, etc. I was asked to review one of the 'specialty' areas of the book and couldn't say anything 'nice' about any of it, since it doesn't really address the questions that it claims to.

BUT--- this is, after all, his own work, it is printed on a vanity press, he is independently wealthy, he really has the right to say whatever the hell he wants to. Fortunately, of course, we also have the right to say anything we want as well.

A page of links to ANKOS reviews...

[jnana]

See here for a page that links to about 15 reviews of ANKOS. My favorite is this review for the Mathematical Association of America.

Re:Praise, either way...

[ariels]

The classification of the sporadic finite simple groups was published in peer-reviewed journals. I believe it is estimated to be around 10,000 pages. Nobody reviewed the whole thing in one fell swoop, of course.

But each portion was reviewed. For instance, Walter Feit and John Thompson proved a first step as Solvability of Groups of Odd Order, Pacific Journal of Mathematics 13 (1963), 775-1029. I do not know if (or what) problems were raised regarding publication of such a long paper.

Re:Amen

[fatphil]

You don't need to 'create' the snowflake, you simply need to model it. Newton's laws of gravity don't made apples fall, they _model_ apples falling. Einstein's special relativity doesn't cause Mercury to precess, it _models_ mercury's precession. Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Pauli, Fermi, Hawking, whoever, all they do is build models. The better the model the happier people are calling it a law. If the rules Wolfram presents (whether they are originally his or no, it doesn't matter) model what happens then they are as valid as any other model. If the models fail then they're not. Judge _after_ you've tested the model.

FP.

You even had to mention the Lorentz system...

[SimHacker]

Krapangor writes: "However Wolfram doesn't seem to understand the complexity which arises even from continuous systems and that in fact non-continuous dependencies can turn up in continuous systems. Do I even have to mention the Lorentz system at all, everyone should know it. But he is just a physicist after all."

This is from the index of Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science":

Lorentz, Hendrik A. (Netherlands, 1853-1928)
and relativity theory, 1041
Lorentz contraction, 1041
Lorentz gas, 1022
Lorentz transformations, 1041, 1042
Lorentzian spaces, 1051

From the notes for Chapter 9, refereing to Page 522, History of Relativity, on page 1041:

[Mentions Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Michelson, Morley, FitsGerald...] Already in 1904 Lorentz pointed out that Maxwell's equations are formally invariant under a so-called Lorentz transformation of space and time coordinates (see note below). [Mentions Einstein, Minkowski, Mach...]

Yet as I discussed earlier in the chapter, if a complete theory of physics is to be as simple as possible, then most things like relativity theory must in effect be derived from more basic features of the theory -- as I start to try to do in the main text of this section.

[End of quote from Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".]

How about reading the book before dismissing it by insulting all physicists?

-Don