- Wolfram, Stephen.
Idea Makers.
Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media, 2016.
ISBN 978-1-57955-003-5.
-
I first met
Stephen Wolfram
in 1988. Within minutes, I knew I was in
the presence of an extraordinary mind, combined with intellectual
ambition the likes of which I had never before encountered. He
explained that he was working on a system to automate much of the
tedious work of mathematics—both pure and applied—with the
goal of changing how science and mathematics were done forever. I not
only thought that was ambitious; I thought it was crazy. But
then Stephen went and launched
Mathematica
and, twenty-eight years and eleven major releases later, his goal has
largely been achieved. At the centre of a vast ecosystem of add-ons
developed by his company, Wolfram Research, and third parties, it has
become one of the tools of choice for scientists, mathematicians, and
engineers in numerous fields.
Unlike many people who founded software companies, Wolfram never took
his company public nor sold an interest in it to a larger company.
This has allowed him to maintain complete control over the
architecture, strategy, and goals of the company and its products. After the
success of Mathematica, many other people, and I, learned
to listen when Stephen, in his soft-spoken way, proclaims what seems
initially to be an outrageously ambitious goal. In the 1990s, he set
to work to invent
A New Kind
of Science: the book was published in 2002, and shows how simple
computational systems can produce the kind of complexity observed in
nature, and how experimental exploration of computational spaces
provides a new path to discovery unlike that of traditional
mathematics and science. Then he said he was going to integrate
all of the knowledge of science and technology into a “big data”
language which would enable knowledge-based computing and the discovery
of new facts and relationships by simple queries
short enough to tweet.
Wolfram Alpha
was launched in 2009, and
Wolfram Language in 2013.
So when Stephen speaks of goals such as
curating
all of pure mathematics or discovering a simple computational model
for fundamental physics, I take him seriously.
Here we have a less ambitious but very interesting Wolfram
project. Collected from essays posted on
his blog
and elsewhere, he examines the work of innovators in
science, mathematics, and industry. The subjects
of these profiles include many people the author met in
his career, as well as historical figures he tries to get to
know through their work. As always, he brings his own
unique perspective to the project and often has insights you'll
not see elsewhere. The people profiled are:
Many of these names are well known, while others may elicit a
“who?”
Solomon Golomb,
among other achievements, was a pioneer in the development of
linear-feedback shift registers,
essential to technologies such as GPS, mobile phones, and error
detection in digital communications. Wolfram argues that Golomb's
innovation may be the most-used mathematical algorithm in history. It's
a delight to meet the pioneer.
This short (250 page) book provides personal perspectives on people
whose ideas have contributed to the intellectual landscape we
share. You may find the author's perspectives unusual, but they're
always interesting, enlightening, and well worth reading.
September 2016 