Hacker News Reader

There is no question that Wolfram is gifted for math and physics but his reputation for exaggerating claims is well known by now, and hearing him casually say that he was mulling over the second law of thermodynamics at age 12 makes me go "Yeah, right".

View on HN

I have met several people telling weaker versions of that or similar claims. I believe them. A more accessible example is to intuit fairly early what computational irreducibility is. Typically one doesn't develop the language to be precise about these ideas until much later. That Wolfram had the correct language available at that age doesn't strike me as unlikely.

That claim seems like not a stretch at all, he had published quantum physics papers at 15.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com