Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A (73 videos)

Biweekly ask-me-anything about the history of science & technology

New episode streaming Wednesday, May 15, at 3:30pm ET. Submit your questions

History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (Apr. 7, 2021) »

1 hour 25 minutes

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What is the history of Lisp? Was Ctrl + = used in Mathematica before Wolfram|Alpha? It's crazy to think that the history of computing is less than 50 years old. Was the first ASCII table only 8 bits long? Have you used Forth? What do you think about stack-based programming languages? What is the history of zero and void through science? What about for debts and things like that for negative numbers? For Version 1 of the Wolfram Language and Mathematica, what parts did you write code for yourself, and what was the distribution of things people worked on? How did you develop code at that time, given there was no CVS or Git? Who discovered Benford's law, that most numbers start more often with 1s than 9s? No wonder the pattern matcher is so slow—it was code you wrote long ago! View Less »

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History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (Mar. 24, 2021) »

1 hour 25 minutes

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What is the history of the discovery of black holes? Is gravitoelectromagnetism sufficient to get black holes with event horizons or do you need the full general relativity? Did you ever meet Stephen Hawking or Chandrasekhar? Is there an instance or phenomenon where an instrument uses a theory... and is there something like Gödel's incompleteness theorem that applies to instruments in physics? What is the history of UFO observations? Results from the Large Hadron Collider about B meson decays... View Less »

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History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (Mar. 10, 2021) »

1 hour 23 minutes

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When did neural networks overtake more traditional optimization approaches, such as nonlinear programming? Why? What was the story? Are memories stored in the brain? Bell Labs is the company that developed C and Unix, right? Did you ever use Lisp? View Less »

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History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (Feb. 24, 2021) »

1 hour 15 minutes

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What are some things you know about the history of mechanics? Why was it the Europeans who created modern mathematics and not the Chinese—the Chinese had a head start? Pascal's triangle was known in China before Europe. Math competitions might have been popular in Poland? There are obvious problems with peer-reviewed academic research. Is there a way that science was developed in the past that we can learn from where we were better at reviewing science? View Less »

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History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (Feb. 10, 2021) »

1 hour 17 minutes

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Any stories about your work for Thinking Machines Corporation? C/C++ have a parallel for loop parallelization, but there's nothing quite for distributed variable storage. Are you aware of combinator graph reduction machines? Have you read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!," "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" and "Tuva or Bust!"? Nowadays every modern computer has a connection machine in the form of a GPU. Of course Stephen knows the person who started the Internet Archive! What were the actual use cases of the interconnections in the connection machine computer? View Less »

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History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (Jan. 27, 2021) »

1 hour 38 minutes

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Did you ever meet any of the Manhattan Project spies, like Klaus Fuchs etc.? Did you have interactions with Aaron Swartz? Is it possible that in moving from the 20 original equations used by Maxwell to the 4 we use today, we treated something as negligible by mistake because quantum theory was not around? Have you met Elon Musk or Steve Jobs? Who did you meet when you worked at the Institute for Advanced Study? Homotopy type theory... Have you met people related to the Human Genome Project? Did you interact with Claude Shannon? The French composer Erik Satie would only eat white food too Anecdotes about Ed Witten or Lenny Susskind? Do you know "Physics from Fisher Information" by Roy Frieden? What's a good place to get one's genome sequenced? How did Joseph Fourier develop the math that led to the Fourier transformation? Have you read Gödel's citizenship hearing? Stories about Steve Jobs? Anecdotes about Feynman? The book "Faster than Thought" by Bowden and Leibniz quote... View Less »

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