Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

What, ultimately, did Wolfram do in these five most productive years? Can it be said in a sentence, or a paragraph?

I always find it interesting when someone claims to have something to say, but can't seem to say it at a short enough length to be held entirely in the human mind.

It's like Bob says he has a beautiful sculpture to show me, but when I ask to see it, he sends me truckload after truckload of modeling clay. The sculpture is constituted from this material, Bob tells me.

Okay, I say, but it seems like you're asking me to do an awful lot of work here, and I don't know you enough to be confident that the effort would be well-spent. So could you maybe show me a complete, smaller scale model, with a bit less detail, that gives me the general idea of what's so special and new about what you've made?



Doesn't the picture at the top give a good summary?


No. "I published XX books and YYY articles" doesn't tell me anything about the actual value. Some authors I heard publish a 3-digit-number articles per year...


> What, ultimately, did Wolfram do in these five most productive years? Can it be said in a sentence, or a paragraph?

He shipped a lot of software, wrote a lot of books and papers, did a lot of media, and substantially advanced his passion projects.

It's unclear how much of the last stuff will pan out and advance human knowledge, but it was still done.


The substance of it remains elusive, however, from TFA’s wall of text, which Wolfram apparently spent his 65th birthday writing.


His software is shit though


Mathematica is great.


He did a laws of physics thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram#Wolfram_Physic... though "Physicists are generally unimpressed." (wikipedia)




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: