Wolfram on the importance of computing for understanding the world
June 6, 2011 at 10:39 am 3 comments
Spending too much time in airports lately, I’ve been catching up on some of my TED video watching — the ones that everyone says I have to watch, but I didn’t have time until now. One of those that I watched recently was Stephen Wolfram’s on A New Kind of Science and Wolfram-Alpha. I realized that he’s really making a computing education argument. He explicitly is saying that computing is necessary for understanding the natural world, and all scientists need to learn about computation in order to make the next round of discoveries about how our universe works.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: computational science, image of computer science, image of computing, science education.
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Bijan Parsia | June 6, 2011 at 10:54 am
But Wolfram is a kook and New Kind of Science is the heart of his kookiness.
I think computation is a key aspect of our conceptualization of the work and a key part of our intellectual toolbox. But Wolfram is a very bad poster child for computation.
He’s really quite nuts.
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Aaron Lanterman | June 10, 2011 at 11:10 pm
I’ve seen those talks; there are some excellent ideas in there, but Wolfram is so self-adoring that it sometimes gets in the way of me appreciating those ideas.
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