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Wolframania

Posted by michael on from the making-a-splash dept.

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.

4 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. His Website.. by routerwhore · · Score: 3, Informative
    More insight on his website:
    www.stephenwolfram.com

    Another good article about his latest work: On Forbes

  2. Whaaaa? Re:So let me get this straight. by gilroy · · Score: 3, Informative
    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.
    --
    The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
  3. A page of links to ANKOS reviews... by jnana · · Score: 3, Informative

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

  4. You even had to mention the Lorentz system... by SimHacker · · Score: 3, Informative
    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

    --
    Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com