Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People

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 twelve 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: Richard Feynman, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, George Boole, Ada Lovelace, Gottfried Leibniz, Benoit Mandelbrot, Steve Jobs, Marvin Minsky, Russell Towle, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead, Richard Crandall, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Solomon Golomb.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.

I enjoyed this book for many reasons. One is that a reader can pick it up and put it down at chapter intervals and not be concerned with remembering all that went before. A random reading of chapters would be totally acceptable. Another reason I liked this book is that it is written by a genius about geniuses, and the familiarity and admiration is apparent. What better way to get the feel of these exceptional humans than from one who is also one? And I was pleased by the effort Wolfram put into studying the human side of the many people he writes of. We cannot forget that geniuses work, play, and manifest themselves in a human environment, are subject to foibles as well as to heights of beneficial creativity, and often are triggered by other humans. I found the chapter on Ada Lovelace to be particularly interesting due to the discerning attempt by Wolfram to interpret her personal life. My one disappointment is the absence of George Green, the amazing, self-educated English mathematician who introduced the Green's function, which bears on nearly every field of physics. Perhaps in 2028, the 200th anniversary of Green's publication of his stunning paper, Wolfram can publish a revised Idea Makers to include him.

This book was a wonderful read. I was specially looking forward to Wolfram's stories about Feynman, S.W having known him in a personal capacity. However, the story about Feynman was the same as the one he posted on his online notes that I read a while ago - so I was reasonably disappointed...but with every other chapter I got the satisfaction of reading equally engrossing new stories of people Wolfram had the good fortune of knowing. The one's he happened not to share the same time period as - Liebniz, Ramanujan etc - had chapters written about them that were surprisingly intimate and very original considering these figures have had one biography after another written about them.Perhaps the most interesting is Wolfram's default question at the end of every chapter of these late scientists, "What would have it been like if they used Wolfram Alpha or Mathematica?", the answer to most is that they would have been adventurers exploring new mathematical worlds and visualizations - which only makes you reflect on Wolfram's own contributions to furthering science, or the mathematical and computational tools to help do science.Particularly original are the chapters on Lovelace and Babbage, armed with pictures, models, notes, letters that only in a few pages make you feel like you know the subjects of the chapter personally. His observation on Ramanujan as an mathematical "tinkerer" and "experimental mathematician" are very interesting. He writes "For Ramanujan, though, I suspects it was facts and results that were the center of his mathematical thinking and proofs felt a bit like some strange European custom...". It makes you ponder one how much the way we do rigorous mathematics through narrative and painful argumentation is not the way everyone has approached the subject. I also loved Wolfram's mention of Hardy's "A Mathematician's Apology", that he thought was a complete disappointment when he read it as a child - which resonated heavily with me - since I was almost equally disappointed when I read the overrated work that many claim to be a defining work that represents their passion.

I have a phd in computer science, and think Wolfram is quite brilliant, but I have not read NKS. For me, this book is worth the price, as it contains some interesting insights and thought-provoking ideas here and there. However, I found very little insight given into what made the thinkers discussed in the book so creative and productive. I also found very little effort made to explain technical concepts, which are often simply mentioned in passing. Example 1: page 202 mentions "polynomial equations involving integers where it's undecidable ... whether or not the equations have solutions". Sounds fascinating, where can I found out more about this? That passage doesn't mention the word "diophantine" nor give any pointers to other references, so a reader who wants more explanation needs to intuit the right keywords to search for online. Example 2: page 12, in the context of Godel's incompleteness theorem, mentions "Elementary geometry and elementary algebra ... have no universal computation, and no analog of Godel's theorem ... we even now have practical software that can prove any statement about them." Again, sounds fascinating, but what would it even mean for these areas to have universal computation? What software is the text referring to? No references are given. Example 3: page 157-159 claim that logic need not be the basis of math, implies that there are alternative "formal systems" other than logic, and states "as computers move to a molecular scale, standard logic will most likely no longer be the most convenient basis to use". Again, sounds fascinating, but I wish I knew where to find more explanation of what Wolfram means by this. The book doesn't contain any index, references, or reading list. The author frequently brings the discussion back to his own work on Mathematica etc., which I can understand is off putting for some readers, but I found some of the connections made to Mathematica interesting.

This is the account of a few tinkerers who expremented with the fields without any design beforehand. Stephen Wolfram is a genius himself. Go read everything written by him.

The book is just a compilation of some blog posts that are freely available on the author's public blog. No new content was added, and even no effort was put into adapting the content properly. For example, the articles contain so many repetitions, which is fine for blogs, just not for a book.The content itself is very good though. It is not just the biography of some prominent figures in science told from the perspective of someone who understands the scientific contributions of the people he talks about, but it is a scientist relating the work of those scientists to his own. In total, it is a unique kind of biographical narrative, one that I enjoyed a lot!

I liked almost every story from the book, especially stories about Ada, Babbage, Ramanujan, Leibniz, and Golomb, about which I had never read before. I myself has interest in biographies, and I think I write a similar book about people who either virtually or really influenced theoretical software diagnostics.

Mathematica開発者として著名なWolframによる、15名の古今東西著名な数学者・物理学者・計算科学者に関するエッセイです。Adaなど、著名でない人も含まれます。Leibnizについては、WolframがHanoverで撮影した写真が見事です。LeibnizはMathematicaのようなものを作りたかったのではないか、と書いていますが、これらの写真を見るとそのように思えます。私の嫌いなハードカバーではありますが、紙質は軽く、気軽に読めるものです。