Stephen Wolfram

So it's kind of like in the tradition of computer languages, programming languages,

that the tradition there has been more, let's take how computers are built and let's specify, let's have a human way to specify, do this, do this, do this, at the level of the way that computers are built.

What I've been interested in is representing sort of the whole world computationally and being able to talk about whether it's about cities or chemicals or

You know, this kind of algorithm or that kind of algorithm, things that have come to exist in our civilization and the sort of knowledge base of our civilization, being able to talk directly about those in a computational language so that both we can understand it and computers can understand it.

I mean, the thing that I've been sort of excited about recently, which I had only realized recently, which is kind of embarrassing, but it's kind of the arc of what we've tried to do in building this kind of computational language is it's a similar kind of arc of what happened when mathematical notation was invented.

So go back 400 years, people were trying to do math.

They were always explaining their math in words.

And it was pretty clunky.

And as soon as mathematical notation was invented, you could start defining things like algebra and later calculus and so on.

It all became much more streamlined.

When we deal with computational thinking about the world, there's a question of what is the notation?

What is the kind of formalism that we can use to talk about the world computationally?

And in a sense, that's what I've spent the last third of a century trying to build.

And we finally got to the point where we have a pretty full-scale computational language that sort of talks about the world.

And that's exciting because it means that just like having this mathematical notation, let us talk about the world mathematically, and let us build up these kind of mathematical sciences, now we have a computational language which allows us to start talking about the world computationally and lets us, you know, my view of it is it's kind of computational X for all X. All these different fields of, you know, computational this, computational that.

That's what we can now build.

Let's step back.

Right.

So, I mean, the two big things that people have sort of...

perhaps heard of that come from Wolfram language.