Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

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

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

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 (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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History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (Jan. 14, 2021) »

1 hour 56 minutes

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The history of Lisp Do you know Noam Chomsky personally? How is Emacs related to Lisp? Do you know Linus Torvalds? Using AI ideas to help NASA identify molecules related to alien life NASA's interest in Sanskrit as a programming language What are Marvin Minsky's contributions to AI? Scheme and Gerry Sussman Why did Ludwig Boltzmann commit suicide? Boltzmann's tombstone says S = k log W If you had to choose only one country's mathematics that you would be allowed to use, which would it be: England, France or Germany? Russian mathematics in the 20th century Did you interact with Jim Watson or Francis Crick? Fact check: Euler's book was titled "Letters to a German Princess." Do you apply the Monte Carlo simulation in any of your work? Did you ever meet Konrad Zuse or study his work? Aaron Klug and Max Perutz Have you met any rocket scientists like Wernher von Braun? View Less »

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