Mathematica Workshop
A complete survey of the latest Mathematica features in two 75 min. parts.
06:15-07:30pm (part I,) and
07:45-08:00pm (part II,) both in Rawles 100.
Workshop presented by Todd Rowland and Matthew Szudzik
"In a massive work in progress tentatively entitled A New Kind of Science,
the mathematical physicist Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, has assembled
a great deal of experimental evidence that almost any combinatorial system that isn't
trivial is computationally universal. I believe he refers to this as the ubiquity of
universality. I hope Wolfram publishes this soon; he's been working on it for a decade.
By the way, Mathematica is an extremely high-level language for doing mathematics. It does
symbolic and numerical computations very well. I think that Hilbert would have loved Mathematica -- I know I do -- because
in a funny way it carries out Hilbert's dream, as much of it as was possible. It's a single formalism that encompasses much of
mathematics, including a lot of mathematical physics. It's a system that knows a lot of mathematics. I would argue that it's a
substantial artificial intelligence, albeit an inhuman one. It embodies only mathematical intelligence."
(Gregory Chaitin, in "Cien años de controversia sobre los fundamentos
de las matemáticas", lecture given at several institutions during
two visits to Buenos Aires in 1998).
