Stephen Wolfram quotes

Stephen Wolfram is a British-American mathematician, physicist, and computer scientist, renowned for his pioneering work in computational science. Creator of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha computational engine, his innovations have transformed scientific computing. He continues to influence multiple fields through his research, writing, and development of new technologies. Here are 27 of his quotes:

I had a very selfish reason for building Mathematica. I wanted to use it myself, a bit like Galileo got to use his telescope four hundred years ago. But I wanted to look, not at the astronomical universe, but at the computational universe.

Stephen Wolfram

If we want to have a predictable life... then we have to build in these... pockets of reducibility. If we were... existing in this irreducible world, we'd never be able to... know what's going to happen.

Stephen Wolfram

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?

Stephen Wolfram

Cellular automata are discrete dynamical systems with simple construction but complex self-organizing behaviour. Evidence is presented that all one-dimensional cellular automata fall into four distinct universality classes. Characterizations of the structures generated in these classes are discussed. Three classes exhibit behaviour analogous to limit points, limit cycles and chaotic attractors. The fourth class is probably capable of universal computation, so that properties of its infinite time behaviour are undecidable.

Stephen Wolfram

Could it be that some place out there in the computational universe, we might find our physical universe?

Stephen Wolfram

I think Computation is destined to be the defining idea of our future.

Stephen Wolfram

Computational reducibility may well be the exception rather than the rule: Most physical questions may be answerable only through irreducible amounts of computation. Those that concern idealized limits of infinite time, volume, or numerical precision can require arbitrarily long computations, and so be formally undecidable.

Stephen Wolfram

There's a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories. Wolfram is unusual in that he's doing this in his 40s.

Stephen Wolfram

[In] Ancient Babylon... they were trying to predict three kinds of things.... where the planets would be, what the weather would be like, and who would win or lose a certain battle; and they had no idea which of these things would be more predictable than the other.

Stephen Wolfram

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.

Stephen Wolfram

I'm committed to seeing this project done. To see if within this decade we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe, and know where our universe lies in the space of all possible universes.

Stephen Wolfram

Stephen has gone out on a limb. He is proposing a paradigm shift. A new twist on everything.

Stephen Wolfram

If we describe... heat... the air... it's this temperature, this pressure. That's as much as we can say... People [from the future] will say, "I just can't believe they didn't realize that there was this detail and all these molecules that were bouncing around, and that they could make use of that."

Stephen Wolfram

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.

Stephen Wolfram

There are a few very small incompatible changes - I really doubt most people will ever run into them.

Stephen Wolfram

You kind of alluded to it in your introduction. I mean, for the last 300 or so years, the exact sciences have been dominated by what is really a good idea, which is the idea that one can describe the natural world using mathematical equations.

Stephen Wolfram

Problem 9. What is the correspondence between cellular automata and continuous systems?

Stephen Wolfram

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.

Stephen Wolfram

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.

Stephen Wolfram

It's clear that we can go further than the quantum mechanics that I've known for the last fifty years.

Stephen Wolfram

What's happened is, for 300 years people basically said, "If you want to make a model of things in the world, mathematical equations are the best place to go. In the last 15 years: it doesn't happen. New models... most often are made with programs, not with equations. ...Was that ...going to happen anyway? Was that a consequence of my particular work and my particular book? It's hard to know for sure. ...Was there a chain of academic references? Probably not.

Stephen Wolfram

[F]iguring out where those pockets [of reducibility] are... is an essential thing... in science. ...If you just pick an arbitrary thing and say, "What's the answer to this question?" That question may not be one that has a computationally reducible answer. ...If you ...walk along the series of questions... you can go down this chain of reducible, answerable things, but if you just... pick a question at random... most likely it will be irreducible. ...When we engineer things, we tend to ...keep in this zone of reducibility. When we're thrown things by the natural world... [we're] not at all certain that we will be kept in this... zone...

Stephen Wolfram