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by jordigh 4380 days ago
Really? You read A New Kind of Science and were awestruck by his genius?

I've read parts of it a few times, and it just reads like a summary of other people's work[1], but if you don't read the appendices, it seems like that all of that other work was also Wolfram's. He's got a nasty habit of saying stuff like "cellullar automata theory teaches..." instead of saying "Marvin Minsky showed that...", as if the theory existed in a vacuum, independently of those who developed it.

Wolfram is well-known for claiming other people's work for himself and suing anyone who claims otherwise. That's how he acquired Mathematica, but trying to find the origins of that story is difficult, because he succeeded in suing everyone into silence.

[1] Plus a lot of "look at the beautiful pictures... LOOK AT THEM!" He's got a weird sense of mathematical rigour, something akin to believing that whatever the computer computes is right. Probably part of his idea of why it's ok to hide mathematics behind NDAs.
1 comments
taliesinb 4380 days ago
Jordigh, that's not the first time you've made that evidence-free claim. Let me make my own: your hostility has less to do with Wolfram and more to do with you. You develop an open source alternative to Matlab. But if the Wolfram Language is really successful, it would make the work you've done fall short of its goal, which is to put all science and math computation on a free, non-proprietary basis.
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jordigh 4380 days ago
Which claim? That he sued everyone in order to acquire control of Mathematica?

Like I said, it's hard to give evidence of that because he sued everyone into silence, but here's some vague allusions about it:

    Wolfram quit Illinois, took the program private, and entered into
    complicated lawsuits with both his former employee and his
    co-authors (all since settled).
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...

I suppose your next move is to discredit this source, but this isn't the first time I hear about it. I remember other vague allusions to this incident, and it fits with Wolfram's overall litigious nature, which is well-documented. I'll try emailing the parties that were probably involved (I think it included at least partially the SMP crowd).

In the meantime, you can keep defending Wolfram, but I don't think you really need to. He's got no shortage of shills.

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