Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

History of Science & Technology Q&A (88 videos)

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

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New episode streaming Wednesday, March 19, 2025, at 3:30pm ET. Submit your questions

History of Science & Technology Q&A:
History of Science and Technology Q&A (June 2, 2021) »

1 hour 29 minutes

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What appeared first in math, complex numbers or vectors? What is the relationship between them? Square root of negatives... Real variables, rational numbers, analysis... why not just stick to integers? What's the largest number you've ever used in practice in a computation? Did moving from Roman numerals to Hindu-Arabic help merchants back in the day? Was tau used before pi? Did Feynman overestimate Fredkin? Have string theorists underestimated Fredkin? Did you work much with Murray Gell-Mann? Any shareable stories? What is your opinion on the resurgence of UFOs? View Less »
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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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