Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People by Stephen Wolfram (PDF)

Description

This book of thoroughly engaging essays from one of today’s most prodigious innovators provides a uniquely personal perspective on the lives and achievements of a selection of intriguing figures from the history of science and technology. Weaving together his immersive interest in people and history with insights gathered from his own experiences, Stephen Wolfram gives an ennobling look at some of the individuals whose ideas and creations have helped shape our world today.From his recollections about working with Richard Feynman to his insights about how Alan Turing’s work has unleashed generations of innovation to the true role of Ada Lovelace in the history of computing, Wolfram takes the reader into the minds and lives of great thinkers and creators of the past few centuries and shows how great achievements can arise from dramatically different personalities and life trajectories. Contents: Preface 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

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review One of the most gifted minds of our time explains, through short stories and anecdotes, how individuals fundamentally transform human thought and perspective. Profoundly humane and smart, this short volume will become a classic for those who want to understand and practice leadership. One leaves this read far smarter and far more confident in the future of humans. JUAN ENRIQUEZ, Author of Evolving Ourselves and As the Future Catches You A remarkable book with flashes of insight that will engage computer scientists, physicists, historians–but also fascinate a broader public as it weaves personal stories into the deep import of how and what they calculated. PETER GALISON, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University, Author of Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps & coauthor of Objectivity How could anyone resist? Stephen Wolfram writes with so much more clarity and eloquence than one could reasonably expect of any groundbreaking scientist, and with so much more humanity and accessible ease than one would ever dare hope for from any genius. I’ve followed Stephen now with constant admiration for the better part of a lifetime, and I’m thrilled to get his illuminating and tremendously enjoyable essays–on everything from Steve Jobs to his own life–all brought together in one hardcover delight. PICO IYER, Author of The Art of Stillness Stephen Wolfram is a quirky, groundbreaking genius, destined for the science pantheon. So novel are his seemingly simple ideas that it may take half a century before the public adopts them. In his lively collection of biographical essays, Wolfram takes the measure of his predecessors and peers–filtering their achievements though his unique worldview. A great read and thought-provoking fun. RUDY RUCKER, Author of Infinity of the Mind and The Ware Tetralogy A gem. Most scientists and engineers do not think of historical figures as interesting people whose life stories are relevant to their current careers. Stephen Wolfram proves that curiosity and a bit of voyeurism can help you think better today and imagine a different future for tomorrow. Even if you hate history or biographies, if you like science, you’ll like this book. JAY WALKER, Founder of priceline.com | Curator of TEDMED & The Library of the History of Human Imagination –Public Relations team at Wolfram Media About the Author Stephen Wolfram has had a unique trajectory in science, technology and business. Widely known for his discoveries in basic science and his groundbreaking 2002 book A New Kind of Science, he has spent three decades building what is now the Wolfram Language: the knowledge-based computer language that powers Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha and has contributed to countless inventions and discoveries, as well as to the education of several generations of students. Wolfram was born in London and educated at Eton, Oxford and Caltech, earning his PhD in physics in 1979 at the age of 20. After a brief but distinguished academic career, he founded Wolfram Research in 1987 and as CEO has built it into one of the world’s most respected and innovative software companies, whose products are relied on by millions of people around the world.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐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

⭐: 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.

⭐Review for Amazon of: Wolfram, Stephen. Idea Makers”Idea Makers” is an uneven collection of essays by Stephen Wolfram about 15 men and 1 woman who have been involved, in various ways, with mathematics and calculatory techniques over the past four centuries. In Dr. Wolfram’s order, the subjects are: Richard Feynman, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, George Boole, Ada Lovelace, Gottfried Leibniz, Benoît Mandelbrot, Steve Jobs, Marvin Minsky, Russell Towle, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead (in one essay), Richard Crandall, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and Solomon Golomb.For me, the essays can be grouped into the following three categories: (a) mostly about the subject, but including comments on how the subject’s work affected Wolfram’s development of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha; (b) mostly about how Wolfram interacted with the subject’s mathematical and/or computational work; and (c) mostly about how Wolfram interacted personally with the subject.Foremost in category (a) are the lengthy essays on Lovelace and Ramanujan. Both of these essays are for me the most detailed and instructive discussions that I have ever read about these two people’s lives and works. Furthermore, the Lovelace essay contains much interesting and instructive information about Charles Babbage and the interactions between him and Lovelace. (I am somewhat surprised that Wolfram did not title this essay as, “Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage”.) Similarly, the Ramanujan essay contains many interesting comments on G. H. Hardy. Only slightly less instructive for me were the somewhat shorter essays on Leibniz and Golomb.In category (b) are the essays on Gödel, Turing, von Neumann, Boole, and Russell and Whitehead. Here Wolfram’s comments highlight the extent to which the subjects’ work has affected, or somewhat surprisingly failed to affect, subsequent work in mathematics, especially computational mathematics.In category (c) are the essays on Feynman, Mandelbrot, Jobs, Minsky, Towle, and Crandall. Here Wolfram provides interesting comments on the subject’s work along with descriptions of his personal interactions with the subject. I was particularly pleased to learn about Towle and Crandall, neither of whom can I recall having previously been aware of.Throughout the book, a consistently disappointing and frustrating problem for me was the poor quality of the illustrations. Most of them are displayed in sizes that required me to use a magnifying glass, and they are printed in relatively low resolution (few dots per inch) halftones on non-glossy paper. Surely Wolfram’s own Wolfram Media, Inc., could have grouped the illustrations on glossy paper inserts, using larger sizes for the illustrations and using much higher dpi densities — all for a reasonably small additional cost. (I say: shame on Wolfram for pinching pennies with respect to the illustrations. Personally, I’d be glad to pay twice the book’s price for a copy with high-quality, larger illustrations.)Another disappointment is the absence of an index (this despite the availability of indexing as a feature in several high-end wordprocessing and publishing programs).(A side note: I own a copy of Dr. Wolfram’s 2015 book, “An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language”, also published by Wolfram Media, Inc. The 2015 book is published on semi-gloss paper, which renders the graphics beautifully and clearly, even those that display subtle shadings of color to help the viewer interpret the surface as curved in three dimensions. This book also contains an excellent index. Dr. Wolfram clearly knows how to provide these desirable features in a Wolfram Media publication. Again, I say: shame on him for not providing them in “Idea Makers”.)How did I arrive at my overall rating of this book? A computational approach being obviously appropriate, I began by using Mathematica (to which I have maintained a personal license for over 17 years) to generate a random sample of size 40 from the 239 pages in “Idea Makers” (not including the 10 pages of prefatory comments). I counted the numbers of lines of text in the pages in the sample, taking into account whether or not a page contained illustrations.For the calculations that follow, I used a LibreOffice Calc 5.1 spreadsheet running in LinuxMint 18. First, I developed the following mean numbers of textlines per page: For pages without illustrations, this mean number was 31.525; for pages with illustrations, this mean number was 15.565.Next, for each essay I counted the numbers of pages with illustrations and without illustrations. Using the preceding paragraph’s mean numbers of text lines for the pages, I estimated the numbers of text lines for pages with and without illustrations. The results were the following estimated total numbers of text lines: For essays in category (a), 3,368.970; for essays in category (b), 1,155.275; and for essays in category (c), 998.995.For my personal ratings of the essays in the three categories, I assigned 5 to essays in category (a), 4 to those in category (b), and 3 to those in category (c). Using these weights, I arrived at a mean rating of the essays as 4.43. From this initial rating I deducted 1 point for the generally disappointing illustrations and 0.5 points for the omission of an index. With the deductions, the result is an overall rating of 2.93, which I rounded off to 3.

⭐What a wonderful story book. Real stories.

⭐Nice overview of key figures in mathematics in general as well as computing. A bit too much plugging of his book “New Kind of Science”, as well as Wolfram and Mathematic software.

⭐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.

⭐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 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.

⭐Una personale lista di pensatori/smanettoni ritenuti importanti da Stephen Wolfram. Bella la ricostruzione delle vicende di Ada Lovelace, la prima programmatrice della storia. L’inventrice del concetto di ciclo nei programmi. Interessante anche la storia del’ing. dell’esercito Italiano Manabrea, futuro presidente del consiglio, che si interessò della macchina per il calcolo automatico di Charles Babbage.

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