Stephen Wolfram On Starting a Long-Term Company
stephenwolfram.com
stephenwolfram.com
As in every profession, there are lots of "artists". Some also have substance though: ie. Feynman was like Dali: some neat stuff (teaching) and some less neat1, to still make a living.
1 ,,Please send my notes back'' -- Stückelberg (not the painter), as his worst enemy used to joke (back) to him
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/
Stolen, in that he claims the lion's share of the credit, while having contributed very little.
Did you know that he sued a subordinate to prevent the publication of a theorem that "was rightfully his" ?
2) Some discussion:
http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=399736&ts...
3) the case, on public record:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030822002640/http://www.courtho...
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Wolfram Research Inc. v. Matthew Cook
8/31 CV00-9357 CBM
Notice of joint stipulation and join stipulation re plaintiff Wolfram Research Inc.’s motion to compel the production of documents from California Institute of Technology.
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()one to ten Wolfram Egocentricity Lineal Scale.
Personally I appreciate that Stephen Wolfram tries to talk about his work in a larger context and using terms that even a layperson can understand, rather than hiding behind specialist jargon and the false modesty of a traditional expert persona.
He may not be right about computational program-space mining becoming a trillion-dollar industry, but he's brave enough to frame his long-term enthusiasm in these terms. What's the worst that can happen? If it eventually turned out that he was right, he'd certainly be remembered. If he's wrong, no big deal -- it doesn't take anything away from his accomplishments as a programmer and CEO.
He could have easily spent his entire life writing 2 sentence paragraphs. Or he could have delegated his writing to someone else.
But that surely would have introduced errors. With his new discovery, his deep and unique ideas may finally become more accessible to the rest of us.