Stephen Wolfram

And I still have my files now.

But that's what happens when it's finiteness of human lives.

Maybe if he'd lived another 20 years, I would have remembered to give it back.

But I think that was his attempt to systematize the ways that one does integrals that show up in particle physics and so on.

Turns out the way we've actually done it is very different from that way.

I'm smiling because, you know, the funny thing about him was that the thing he was really, really, really good at is calculating stuff.

But he thought that was easy.

because he was really good at it.

And so he would do these things where he would calculate some, do some complicated calculation in quantum field theory, for example, come out with a result.

Wouldn't tell anybody about the complicated calculation because he thought that was easy.

He thought the really impressive thing was to have the simple intuition about how everything works.

So he invented that at the end.

And, you know, because he'd done this calculation and knew how it worked, it was a lot easier.

It's a lot easier to have good intuition when you know what the answer is.

And then he would just not tell anybody about these calculations.

And he wasn't meaning that maliciously, so to speak.

It's just he thought that was easy.

And that led to areas where people were just completely mystified and they kind of followed his intuition, but nobody could tell why it worked.

Because actually the reason it worked was because he'd done all these calculations and he knew that it would work.

And, you know, he and I worked a bit on quantum computers actually back in 1980, 81, before anybody had heard of those things.