Stephen Wolfram on 25 Years of Steve Jobs' Influence

[FloatingBones]

I've not posted anything anywhere, despite having worked for Steve at NeXT in the late eighties, but this thread brought back memories. I was doing developer relations for NeXT, so I was involved in many of the meetings with folks like Wolfram. (Don't get me started on refereeing meetings between Jobs and Gates Mathematica was a fascinating program, even in those early days, and I enjoyed supporting Theo Gray, who did the actual port to the NeXT machine (and more recently has created the "Elements" app for the iPad).

I love the hundreds thousands of stories that have popped up this week. Thanks for sharing this.

Earlier this year, there was a session with Theodore Gray at the O'Reilly TOC Publishing Conference (page about the session here; YouTube archive here). He tells the story of gathering his real collection of the elements -- at least the ones that are possible to gather -- and "the power of eBay" to help with that. Ted's a great guy; he was the major force behind the Wolfram Demonstrations Project and the Computable Document Format (CDF) player.

I've lusted after Mathematica for the last quarter-century, but coud never justify springing for its four-figure price. The instant Wolfram announced the "personal" edition, I jumped on it. I love using it to explore mathematical ideas, purely for my own amusement. This sort of application is a "brain amplifier" - it enhances an ability the brain alteady posesses. I hope to see it on the iPad someday - I think that would be a true embodiment of one of Steve's dreams.

Wolfram has noted that the CDF player will be coming soon to iOS and Android. As far as I've heard, the CDF player is essentially the full Mathematica engine; I don't know how much it would take to provide the capability of the full Mathematica package. Perhaps Wolfram will go with a distributed approach and have cloud resources do part of the work.

Wolfram has some interesting business decisions. Will they work to make Mathematica available to the masses? Or will they keep their authoring tool at premium prices and encourage Mathematica users to publish CDF files? Either way, I hope we have an explosion of people who explore the beauty of mathematics with Mathematica.

 

[MacPioneer]

Someday, some non-mathematician is going to piss off the academic community by solving some significant mathematical problem with the help of Mathematica, and it will be Steve Jobs and Stephen Wolfram who'll be credited with giving him/her the tools to do it with.

 

[dqfayi]

there are still a group of person who would not like to believe his passing away....god bless all of us....

 

[twoodcc]

interesting. i hope they do end up making a movie about Steve. i plan on buying the book

 

[macsmurf]

Someday, some non-mathematician is going to piss off the academic community by solving some significant mathematical problem with the help of Mathematica, and it will be Steve Jobs and Stephen Wolfram who'll be credited with giving him/her the tools to do it with.

Significant mathematical problems are usually solved with proofs. Mathematica doesn't help you to write proofs. Also, people who solve significant mathematical problems don't really piss off mathematicians. Quite the contrary.

 

[FloatingBones]

Someday, some non-mathematician is going to piss off the academic community by solving some significant mathematical problem with the help of Mathematica, and it will be Steve Jobs and Stephen Wolfram who'll be credited with giving him/her the tools to do it with.

Mathematica runs on PCs, Macs, and Linux machines, and it runs the same way on each platform. I can't quite imagine someone's giving credit to their particular kind of computer for what they discovered with Mathematica. It would be kinda like thanking the guy who invented the transistor.

Mathematica is useful for engineering types for their work. For the rest of us, the greatest gift of Mathematica is the ability to visualize and explore the dynamics of mathematics, physics, and art. With the demonstrations projects, you can sit down with a junior high or HS student and show them that mathematics is fun and beautiful. The upcoming CDF player for the iPad and Android tablets will increase the leverage of demonstrations in Mathematica.

 

[MacPioneer]

Significant mathematical problems are usually solved with proofs. Mathematica doesn't help you to write proofs. Also, people who solve significant mathematical problems don't really piss off mathematicians. Quite the contrary.

Conjectures are an important aspect of mathematical thought (see Riemann, Goldbach, et al). Mathematica is a wonderfully tool for exploring conjectures, either reinforcing (_not_ proving) them, or disproving them.