Idea Makers

by Stephen Wolfram

Recommended by Nassim Taleb as an improvement on scientists’ portraits normally written by science communicators, instead written by an insider. The book is a collection of profiles on Idea Makers that either influenced Wolfram personally or connected to his own work in some way.

Life influcences one’s ideas; other’s lives can influence your ideas

That is not to say that people always live the paradigms they create—in fact, often, almost paradoxically, they don’t. But ideas arise out of the context of people’s lives. Indeed, more often than not, it’s a very practical situation that someone finds themselves in that leads them to create some strong, new, abstract idea.

What can I learn from historical examples about how things I’m involved in now will work out? How can I use people from the past as models for people I know now? What can I learn for my own life from what these people did in their lives?

Deep understanding seems easy from the outside but takes focused reflection

Once [Feynman had] gotten the answer, he’d go back and try to figure out why it was obvious. And often he’d come up with one of those classic Feynman straightforward-sounding explanations. And he’d never tell people about all the calculations behind it.

Steve Jobs stands out most for his clarity of thought. Over and over again he took complex situations, understood their essence, and used that understanding to make a bold definitive move, often in a completely unexpected direction.

But [Ramanujan’s] greatest skill was, I think, something in a sense more mysterious: an uncanny ability to tell what was significant, and what might be deduced from it.

For a start, it really helps to know more—and certainly a lot of my best ideas have come from making connections between things I’ve learned decades apart. It also helps to have more experience and intuition about how things will work out. And if one has earlier successes, those can help provide the confidence to move forward more definitively, without second guessing. Of course, one must maintain the constitution to focus with enough intensity—and be able to concentrate for long enough—to think through complex things.

On Software and Programming

For Gödel’s seemingly bizarre technique of encoding statements in terms of numbers was a critical step towards the idea of universal computation—which implied the possibility of software, and launched the whole computer revolution.

Marvin immediately launched into talking about how programming languages are the only ones that people are expected to learn to write before they can read.

He was always a little too original to be in the mainstream, with the result that there are few fields where he is widely known.