About Stephen Wolfram

The creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science.

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On the Nature of Time

2024-10-09 05:41:58

The Computational View of Time Time is a central feature of human experience. But what actually is it? In traditional scientific accounts it’s often represented as some kind of coordinate much like space (though a coordinate that for some reason is always systematically increasing for us). But while this may be a useful mathematical description, […]

Nestedly Recursive Functions

2024-09-28 01:50:59

Yet Another Ruliological Surprise Integers. Addition. Subtraction. Maybe multiplication. Surely that’s not enough to be able to generate any serious complexity. In the early 1980s I had made the very surprising discovery that very simple programs based on cellular automata could generate great complexity. But how widespread was this phenomenon? At the beginning of the […]

Five Most Productive Years: What Happened and What’s Next

2024-08-30 00:31:46

So… What Happened? Today is my birthday—for the 65th time. Five years ago, on my 60th birthday, I did a livestream where I talked about some of my plans. So… what happened? Well, what happened was great. And in fact I’ve just had the most productive five years of my life. Nine books. 3939 pages […]

What’s Really Going On in Machine Learning? Some Minimal Models

2024-08-23 02:28:17

The Mystery of Machine Learning It’s surprising how little is known about the foundations of machine learning. Yes, from an engineering point of view, an immense amount has been figured out about how to build neural nets that do all kinds of impressive and sometimes almost magical things. But at a fundamental level we still […]

Yet More New Ideas and New Functions: Launching Version 14.1 of Wolfram Language & Mathematica

2024-08-01 05:53:02

For the 36th Time… the Latest from Our R&D Pipeline There’s Now a Unified Wolfram App Vector Databases and Semantic Search RAGs and Dynamic Prompting for LLMs Connect to Your Favorite LLM Symbolic Arrays and Their Calculus Binomials and Pitchforks: Navigating Mathematical Conventions Fixed Points and Stability for Differential and Difference Equations The Steady Advance […]

Ruliology of the “Forgotten” Code 10

2024-06-01 23:21:39

My All-Time Favorite Science Discovery June 1, 1984—forty years ago today—is when it would be fair to say I made my all-time favorite science discovery. Like with basically all significant science discoveries (despite the way histories often present them) it didn’t happen without several long years of buildup. But June 1, 1984, was when I […]

Why Does Biological Evolution Work? A Minimal Model for Biological Evolution and Other Adaptive Processes

2024-05-04 02:40:24

The Model Why does biological evolution work? And, for that matter, why does machine learning work? Both are examples of adaptive processes that surprise us with what they manage to achieve. So what’s the essence of what’s going on? I’m going to concentrate here on biological evolution, though much of what I’ll discuss is also […]

When Exactly Will the Eclipse Happen? A Multimillennium Tale of Computation

2024-03-30 02:32:14

See also: “Computing the Eclipse: Astronomy in the Wolfram Language” » Updated and expanded from a post for the eclipse of August 21, 2017. Preparing for April 8, 2024 On April 8, 2024, there’s going to be a total eclipse of the Sun visible on a line across the US. But when exactly will the eclipse […]

Computing the Eclipse: Astronomy in the Wolfram Language

2024-03-30 02:30:58

See also: “When Exactly Will the Eclipse Happen? A Multimillennium Tale of Computation” » Basic Eclipse Computation It’s taken millennia to get to the point where it’s possible to accurately compute eclipses. But now—as a tiny part of making “everything in the world” computable—computation about eclipses is just a built-in feature of the Wolfram Language. The […]

Can AI Solve Science?

2024-03-06 06:21:12

Note: Click any diagram to get Wolfram Language code to reproduce it. Wolfram Language code for training the neural nets used here is also available (requires GPU). Won’t AI Eventually Be Able to Do Everything? Particularly given its recent surprise successes, there’s a somewhat widespread belief that eventually AI will be able to “do everything”, […]

The Story Continues: Announcing Version 14 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica

2024-01-10 06:33:01

Version 14.0 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica is available immediately both on the desktop and in the cloud. See also more detailed information on Version 13.1, Version 13.2 and Version 13.3. Building Something Greater and Greater… for 35 Years and Counting Today we celebrate a new waypoint on our journey of nearly four decades with […]

Observer Theory

2023-12-12 04:44:16

The Concept of the Observer We call it perception. We call it measurement. We call it analysis. But in the end it’s about how we take the world as it is, and derive from it the impression of it that we have in our minds. We might have thought that we could do science “purely […]