[defrost]

It's a mild takedown in the set of all Wolfram slams.

See, for example: A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity (2002) http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

I met Wolfram some 20 years before that review when he was on a world tour promoting the earliest iterations of Mathematica, the first iteration post his symbolic differentation work.

This was the period when cellular automata, Mandelbrot sets, and symbolic math were pretty hot topics about math departments - computer assisted proofs on monster groups in symbolic algebra were recent, Cayley (the first iteration of Magma) was being written at Sydney University, etc.

Even then he had many of the traits that Cosma Shalizi described in the linked review above and was already dismissing various people for their 'poor ideas' and later claiming those ideas as his own.

He's a smart guy. He swam in waters filled with smart people, some smarter. He was never, IMHO, as smart as his own legend, as authored by himself.

[andbberger]

shalizi is overwhelmingly charming. i have wanted to work with him for years, as much for the whimsy of his website as our overlap in research interests

[burning_hamster]

Not to mention a fantastic writer. Already his PhD thesis was brilliant, and one of the few [1] I have ever read cover-to-cover. "Advanced data analysis from an elementary point of view" is one of my go-to recommendations for people (scientists) that have had some exposure to different concepts in data analysis (typically some regression and PCA), but want to acquire a more systematic understanding. His writing is charming as ever, his exposition exceptionally clean and straightforward, the math as simple as possible but not simpler, the advice practical. He manages to walk the very fine line in mathematical writing of being rigorous enough that the reader feels being taken seriously, while being engaging enough and maintaining a pace that allows one to actually finish the whole book without burning out.

[1] Four, to be exact, and that number includes my own.