[submain]

His book "A new kind of science" is quite fascinating and has some interesting ideas about cellular automata. But I couldn't finish it because of how every few pages there is something about how great the author/his ideas are.

[NelsonMinar]

Famously, without a bibliography. Odd choice for a book claiming to be a substantial field-defining scientific work.

A few years later a list of "books that have been added to his permanent collection" appeared in lieu of a bibliography. It's pretty good but perhaps too comprehensive. https://www.wolframscience.com/reference/books/

In 2012 he wrote about why he didn't have references or bibliography. It's a New Kind of Publishing, too. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/05/living-a-paradig...

[abdullahkhalids]

This is the reasoning from the link above, which I post without comment.

> I always consider history important—both for giving credit and for letting one better understand the context of ideas.... I resolved that rather than just throwing in disembodied references, I would actually do the work of trying to unravel and explain the detailed histories of things.

> And the result was that of the nearly 300,000 words of notes at the back of the book, a significant fraction are about history. I did countless hours of (often fascinating) primary interviews and went through endless archives—and in the end was rather proud of the level of historical scholarship I managed to achieve. And when it came to traditional references I figured that rather than using yet more printed pages, I should just include in the notes appropriate names and keywords, from which anyone—even with the state of web search in 2002—could readily find whatever primary literature they wanted, at greater depth and more conveniently than from lists of journal page numbers.

[ska]

This book is perhaps most valuable as an example of why you need an editor.

[noahmotion]

Unfortunately, it needed a new kind of editor, one which has yet to be discovered, even after all these years.