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Comment by lkozma | Hacker News Reader

Can someone objectively describe Wolfram's main scientific accomplishments?

A PhD in particle physics from Caltech ... at age 20?

A phd in particle physics (even from caltech) can be as meaningless as journalism from yale/harvard. Entire careers have been based on strings ...which is famously not even wrong.

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

I disagree: you definitely have to be able to understand lots of complicated stuff to get a PhD in astrophysics from a place like Caltech. And even if string theory isn't physics (i.e., doesn't make testable predictions) it still is a kind of math or at least inspires a lot of math.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=mathematica

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=S+Wolfram+and+...

Both stolen:

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" ?

Wow, what a jerk if that's true. Do you have any reference?

1) The link above

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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Even Mathematica was based largely on Macsyma.

...not to mention macsyma

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