Stephen Wolfram Quotations

Rocks are computationally equivalent to humans.

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today.

The fact that the same symbolic programming primitives work for those as work for math kinds of things, I think, really validates the idea of symbolic programming being something pretty general.

Well, the first thing to say is that we've worked hard to maintain compatibility, so that any program written with an earlier version of Mathematica can run without change in 3.0, and any notebook can be converted.

So the thing I realized rather gradually - I must say starting about 20 years ago now that we know about computers and things - there's a possibility of a more general basis for rules to describe nature.

The thing that got me started on the science that I've been building now for about 20 years or so was the question of okay, if mathematical equations can't make progress in understanding complex phenomena in the natural world, how might we make progress?

I want to know the truth, however perverted that may sound.

...All the wonders of our universe can in effect be captured by simple rules, yet ... there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules, except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold.

The most important precedents deal with the whole idea of symbolic programming - the notion of setting up symbolic expressions that can represent anything one wants, and then having functions that operate on both their structure and content.

If I can't understand something, then it's probably nonsense.