Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A (81 videos)

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

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History of Science & Technology Q&A:
History of Science and Technology Q&A (May 5, 2021) »

1 hour 18 minutes

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​Why did humanity spend so much time not building technology? ​​Do you think the most important technical advances are due to individuals or groups? ​What are the greatest true things that Stephen Hawking discovered? ​Research in universities and innovation from private industry... ​Do you know people at Renaissance Technologies? Do you think computer science is an actual science? There's a lot that seems like it's engineering. Historical Timeline of Systematic Data and the Development of Computable Knowledge... View Less »
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History of Science & Technology Q&A:
History of Science and Technology Q&A (Apr. 21, 2021) »

1 hour 21 minutes

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​Is there a scientific discovery that was "forgotten" and later rediscovered by someone else that you wish had been recognized originally? ​How did computational complexity theory emerge, and is there research in that field that you find promising? ​Has the Voynich manuscript ever been decoded? ​Does a proof not exist to show that NP cannot be done in P? Is that the way to solve the P vs. NP problem, assuming P is a subset of NP? Could a computer randomly generate and test all algorithms from a graph of all possibilities? Have you done any work with VR, virtual reality? A cool VR site would be a digital Louvre where you enter and walk around looking at NFTs and other types of exhibits. View Less »
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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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