5/3/2021 An Interview with Stephen Wolfram

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An Interview with Stephen Wolfram

Paul Wellin, Mathematica in Education 2 (1993) 11–16.

Stephen Wolfram is certainly no newcomer to our readers. As founder and president

of Wolfram Research, Inc., he has been involved in almost every aspect of the
phenomenal growth of this five year old company. Wolfram's science career began as
a research physicist and quickly led to areas in mathematics and computer science.
He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, among them a MacArthur Prize
Fellowship in 1981.

In this interview, conducted in a small cafe in Northern California, Wolfram

discusses his educational background, some of the history of Mathematica, and his
view of its role in education. His opinions on the current state of mathematics and
computer science education will be sure to disturb some, while others will find
confirmation of what they already knew or suspected.

PW: Let's start out talking about your own education. What originally got you involved
in science and math?

SW: Well, I went to fine English schools, and learned lots of useful things there about
how to write good English prose and so on. But my interests in science had pretty
much nothing to do with my official school education. As it happens, I got interested in
science very young—by the time I was ten, I was already reading lots of physics books.
Mostly what happened was that I would get excited about particular areas of science,
then I would try to read everything I could about those areas. All along, the thing that
got me really excited was looking at problems that hadn't been solved before. It turns
out that when you are fourteen years old and thinking about physics, it isn't too hard to
find problems that—at least as far as you know—haven't been solved before. I suppose
the approach actually worked out fairly well—I started publishing physics papers when
I was fifteen.

PW: You went to Oxford for college, but never finished there?

SW: That's right.

PW: So what led from there to Caltech?

SW: I was pretty much on the track of doing particle physics research, and being a
physics undergraduate at Oxford wasn't a particularly useful environment in which to
do particle physics research. Since I had the opportunity fairly easily to go to graduate
school in the U.S., I decided to do that and I chose to go to Caltech.

The first year that I was at Caltech was the year that I had the highest rate of
publishing papers of any time in my life. I actually think that on average, I was turning

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out a particle physics paper every few weeks. My main conclusion was that I did in fact
know how to do particle physics research, so I collected together some of those papers
and made a Ph.D. thesis out of it. I ended up getting my Ph.D. when I was just 20. In
later years, I've realized that it was a big mistake not to make the effort to get my Ph.D.
a few weeks earlier: it would be so amusing to say that one got one's Ph.D. when one
was a teenager!

Anyway, after I got my Ph.D. I started thinking about doing things other than particle
physics. At the time, I was involved in doing various particle physics calculations which
involved very complicated algebraic expressions. I ended up trying to use Macsyma®
to do these things. I had already been using Macsyma for several years for a variety of
purposes. But my big disappointment was that after having written an incredibly ugly
giant piece of code to do particle physics calculations, it in the end didn't work properly
because of various limitations in Macsyma.

As a result of that experience, I decided that it should be possible to do something

better than Macsyma. So my first step was to talk to the folks who had originally
written Macsyma and try to persuade them that it was time to build a second
generation system. What ended up happening, though, was that the older people who
were involved in the project said, "Well, you're probably right that we could do a lot
better if we started again, but we're too old to consider doing that." The younger people
said, "No, no, Macsyma is the best thing you could possibly do along these lines—you
could never do better." I didn't really believe that, and so I embarked on what became
the SMP project, which was an effort to build a really powerful algebraic computation
system. One of the very important things that happened in the course of building SMP
was that I realized that there was a much richer style of programming that could be
used when doing symbolic computations—rather than the Pascal-Algol-Fortan-like
programming that was for example, built into Macsyma.

PW: Was your primary interest at this point to use SMP for particle physics or did you
have broader goals?

SW: Well, it was pretty clear that just to do particle physics, one was going to have to
have a very broad range of capabilities. And if one was going to go to all the effort to
build such a system, the system better be as general as possible.

PW: The early computer algebra systems—Macsyma, SMP, etc.—were they used
purely as research tools or was there some notion that they might be used in the
classroom also?

SW: At that time it was not really practical to think of using these things in the
classroom. SMP was built to run on the then-emerging class of mini-computer systems
such as VAXes, and VAXes were in the multi-hundred thousand dollar price range, so
it wasn't realistic to think of those things being used in a serious way in the classroom.

PW: How did the jump from SMP to Mathematica come about?

SW: After I finished being involved in the SMP project, I got interested in trying to
solve what I think is one of the more important fundamental problems in science—how
complexity arises in nature. I worked for a number of years on that, and made rather
good progress, using what one can think of as an experimental mathematics approach:
taking simple computational systems and seeing what they do, and trying to develop
theories on the basis of those observations. One of the things that happened in doing
that, was that I realized that the main limiting factor in the science I was doing was the
time it took to prepare each experiment. I think I'm a fairly good C programmer—by

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now I've written a significant fraction of a million lines of C code—but it was still taking
me many hours to set up a particular experiment by creating a new C program. One of
the things that I realized was necessary to make more progress in that kind of research
was to develop a system that could allow one to interactively do high-level
programming to specify one's problems in a way that was as close as possible to how
one thought about them, and not to have to go through this rather painful step of
writing fairly low-level C programs. So that was one issue I was confronted with.

The other thing was that around 1986, I realized that there were going to be personal
computers powerful enough to run a fairly general, fairly sophisticated computational
system; I thought that was a very interesting intellectual and business opportunity. So I
decided to build Mathematica. As it turned out, the timing was very good. At the time
when Mathematica came out, we were just on the part of the curve where Macintoshes,
and soon PCs, were powerful enough to run that kind of thing.

There were a lot of issues that came up in thinking about how Mathematica could be
applied to education, and whether it would be applied to education. In the computer
industry, it was believed at that time that selling programs for the educational market
was a waste of time—that this was not a business proposition. In fact, that belief even
extended to selling programs to the research part of the university community. Much
of the early thinking about Mathematica, as it was presented to the computer industry,
was how this should be used by engineers, and not what could happen with it in
academia. In fact, I consider one of the business achievements of Mathematica to show
that it is in fact a meaningful business proposition—to make programs where
significant effort is put in to meeting the needs of academia.

I didn't know how effectively Mathematica would catch on in education. In fact, I was
at first pessimistic about the number of years it would take before there was really
significant usage of Mathematica in education. What I thought in the beginning, was
that in five to ten years, there would be significant stuff going on with Mathematica in
education. I was very pleasantly surprised that within one or two years the early
adopters were already doing very interesting things with Mathematica.

PW: Were there more institutions involved in the early development processes, other
than the University of Illinois?

SW: There were certainly many research users, many of whom do teaching as well. I
think that there was a surprisingly quick realization that Mathematica was relevant to
the whole calculus reform movement. We were very lucky, though, that Horacio Porta
and Jerry Uhl at Illinois jumped into this whole thing as quickly and as effectively as
they did.

PW: The state of science and math in this country is really quite perplexing. On the
one hand, we have some of the finest research institutions in the world. On the other
hand, it is widely recognized that the teaching of these subjects is sorely in need of
repair. Our students often can't apply their knowledge to relevant problems, let alone
use a computer to do any significant work in science.

SW: I remember a couple of early experiences interacting with the "computers and
education" crowd at conferences. The experiences varied—from me being very
pleasantly surprised at how quickly people seemed to be catching on to the potential
for this kind of thing, to complete horror at the fact that people like the ones I was
seeing were actually teaching young Americans about science or mathematics.

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I continue to be amazed that, in the math educational process, there is such an
emphasis on, as I see it, highly esoteric issues of pure mathematics. The notion of proof
is an interesting one, but very few people in adult life so to speak, "do proofs." That
kind of thinking is, I think, most prevalent among mathematicians and lawyers. I think
the emphasis on that kind of thing in mathematics education is a consequence of some
kind of trickle-down effect from the influence of mathematics research in this century.

PW: As a mathematician, I might argue that you can rest assured that the
mathematics you use in your science is secure because the foundations have been
tidied up by the diligence of the mathematical community.

SW: I guess I have a stronger belief in "truth" than I do in "proof." As experimental

mathematics becomes more widespread, the divergence between truth and proof, in
mathematics, will become larger. If you look at any area of science, there are far more
experimentalists than theoreticians. Mathematics is the unique exception to this trend.
It is my very strong suspicion that within a few decades, things will have switched
around—there will be, as there are in physics, more experimental mathematicians than
theoretical mathematicians. With luck, that change will reflect itself in parts of the
educational process of mathematics—and I think that will be very healthy, because in
my opinion, the fraction of people who are in a position to appreciate pure
mathematics is very small. I don't think I'm one of them, for example, even though I
am certainly a fairly serious user of mathematics. The idea of presenting mathematics
in education as being about proofs is really the wrong thing.

PW: Is this why computer science and mathematics departments have diverged so
strongly in the recent past?

SW: One of the biggest mistakes of research mathematics in America in the last 50
years has been to let computer science get away. If you look at what was done when
computing was young, there was a strong and definite strand of computing that was
essentially part of mathematics. The mathematicians rejected it: this was a big mistake.
While there is a certain track of computer science which is basically computer
engineering, the fact that computing and mathematics ended up being adversaries
rather than being close intellectually, was a big mistake of the mathematics
community.

When Mathematica was quite young, and I talked to people in the computer industry
about doing mathematics on computers, they said to me, "Why would anybody want to
do that?" It's quite ironic, considering that in the early days of computing with von
Neumann, Turing, and others, one of the original conceptions (at least one of the major
tracks) was that one was building these machines to automate mathematics. There was
another track saying that one was building these machines to automate what the
census bureau does, which is a separate bookkeeping area. But by the time personal
computers had come out in the late '70s and early '80s, the computer industry had this
idea that what computers were used for was word processing, spreadsheets, etc., and
the notion that one could use computers to do mathematics was bizarre.

PW: Even with the early computational number theorists such as D.H. Lehmer at
Berkeley?

SW: I'm afraid that none of the leaders of the computer industry have probably ever
heard of D.H. Lehmer. But there were certainly a small number of mathematicians who
had used computers to do essentially experimental mathematics for some time. Even
in academic mathematics, though, these people were a tiny corner of the mathematics
community.
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Recently, I happened to be studying the history of computing, and I've really been
struck by the fact that in the early writings about computing, particularly in accounts to
the general public of computing, it was always about these machines that are capable of
automating mathematics. One of the achievements of Mathematica has been to
demonstrate that indeed, computers are useful for mathematics. I think it was an
unfortunate fact that the mathematics community itself had been so much against
computers.

PW: There has been discussion (and hope by some) that mathematics and the rest of
the sciences will tend to become less distinct. They are becoming more and more
involved in similar computational tasks, albeit on different problems.

SW: With the current system of science in America, I don't see any mechanism to
reduce the rigidity of it. I think it's a hell of a pity, because more good science and more
useful science could be done if there was less rigidity. Over the 15 years or so that I've
been doing science in America, I've just seen increasing rigidification in the funding
agencies and the universities. Everything has to fit into a mathematics department or a
physics department or whatever else. The early hope that computing would cut across
these things and develop more interdisciplinary approaches, really hasn't panned out.

There's a question that I really don't know the answer to: "Is 'computational science'
something that there should be departments of?" Or, "Is 'computation' really a tool
that should get mentioned in the educational process of all these different areas?"
That's sort of a similar question to how calculus should be dealt with, because calculus
can either be taught in a mathematics department as the domain of mathematics, or it
can be distributed among the engineering and physics departments. That's worked
differently at different places.

I think that in the case of learning about Mathematica, for instance, that question
again comes up. Should Mathematica be taught as a course unto itself—perhaps in the
computer science department, perhaps in the mathematics department? Or should it
be the case that if you are trying to teach about Mathematica, you spend the first two
weeks of the class talking about that, and specialize your discussion to the particular
physics course or whatever you are going to give. My guess is the way things will evolve
(or should evolve), is that there will be one central place where people learn
Mathematica, just as there is one central place where people learn calculus, and then
they can go out and apply it.

PW: It would certainly be a more efficient way to do things.

SW: Yes, but in terms of the rigidity of present-day science, there are two places where
there are issues. One is in the research area, the other is in the educational area. To be
honest, I see more chance for change in the educational area than in the research area.
The research area is so dependent on the structure of funding and things like this, that
I don't see that being something that will change quickly.

In the educational area, I think it is much more plausible that computational science
courses will develop that do cut across the very rigid boundaries that exist right now.
That seems to be a very encouraging thing.

PW: At present, what is the breakdown of educational vs. research users of

Mathematica?

SW: That's a bit of a difficult question to answer. Because when you have a class that
uses Mathematica, how do you count the individual students that are going through

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there? I think that about 40% of the number of copies of Mathematica that are out
there are in the educational sector. About 23% of the revenue that comes in from sales
of Mathematica comes from the educational sector.

When I say educational sector, I mean colleges, high schools, and universities which
includes much research usage of Mathematica. It's hard to be able to come up with
exact figures.

PW: I noticed a rather long debate on the nets recently about the current "role" of
Mathematica. Some people were arguing that presentation features should not be
focused on—that all work should go into algorithm improvement. I am sure that a
similar argument could be put forth about the Mathematica language itself as well. In
light of your previous statement about who is using Mathematica, what is your view of
its present role?

SW: In terms of algorithm development, I am really very satisfied with the point we're
at and the rate at which things are progressing. My big test for these things in terms of,
for example, algebraic algorithms, is to be able to clearly say that if there is an integral
you can think about doing, then Mathematica will be able to do it better than any
person, or any other computer system. This is the same kind of issue as has arisen in
playing chess. There's a point at which eventually the computers are actually just better
than people at doing it. And we're pretty close to that point with many kinds of
integrals.

One area in which you will see some significant development is in the area of
Mathematica interactive documents. People have talked for quite a few years about
"hypertext" and "multi-media" and electronic books, and so on. But there really isn't a
hell of a lot out there that actually makes any sense—except for Mathematica
Notebooks. The fact is that for all the hype that has gone into the idea of electronic
books in the publishing community and the computer industry, the one example of this
that actually seems to be working is Mathematica Notebooks.

There are some things you'd like to be able to do with Mathematica Notebooks that
you can't do now. For example, including beautiful typeset mathematical equations.
That is something we are going to make work, and I think in a very nice way.

PW: I'd like to turn to Mathematica as a programming language entity. From an

educational point of view, would you put the Mathematica language on a par with
Fortran or Pascal?

SW: People might attack me for immodesty, but I think in the present day and age, if
you're teaching general people about programming computers, Mathematica is far and
away the best programming language to use—and I'll tell you why. There are a certain
set of people, who when they are grown up, will write things like compilers. Those
people need to know C and they need to know how to build parsers. But in the world
right now, there are probably only 50 people who write compilers. And probably most
of them learned what they needed outside of school, anyway.

What one should be trying to teach when one teaches people about programming, is
two things. First of all, one should teach them the practicalities of actually doing
programming that they might use later on in life. Second of all, one should teach them
concepts about what it means to program a computer, and what ways of thinking
programming involves.

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Taking the second of those things first, teaching the concepts of programming in a
language like C or Pascal, is crazy. You can only teach a very small subset of what is
known today about the ways it makes sense to do programming.

PW: Well, most computer science departments get around this by requiring their
students to learn half a dozen different languages.

SW: People who just take a CS 101 type course, they'll typically learn C or Pascal. The
pity about that is, knowing about symbolic computation, functional programming,
transformation rules, what it means to do graphics programming—they don't get any of
that stuff in C or Pascal. I think that's a real pity. Knowing the details of how to do
pointer manipulation in C and how to do memory management is absolutely beside the
point in the modern world.

It's a strange anomaly in the history of programming languages that over the last 20
years, there's been an incredible transformation in the computer hardware systems
that exist, and in the kinds of people who use computers and interact with them on a
daily basis. Yet in that period of time, the world of programming languages has
changed almost not at all. I think it will increasingly change. Already, there are many
application programs that have little programming languages attached to them. Some
of them are BASIC-like, some of them are like other kinds of things.

Even if you are not actually going to program in Mathematica later, using
Mathematica as the language to learn about the ideas of programming is the right
thing to do, because it is the broadest of the programming languages. So you can
actually get familiar with all these different concepts in this one environment.

Another thing that is very significant is that in Mathematica—because there is no

really clear line between its programming side and its computational side—you can
immediately do things where you can see the results. You can gently go into
programming. The idea that students have to learn #include<stdio.h>, etc.—this kind
of strange incantation of having to write at least 20 lines of code to get their first C
program working—is really unfortunate. It gives them the idea that programming is
much more of a black-magic kind of thing than it actually is. That's a pity.

In a sense, BASIC was, from that point of view, a much better kind of language. But
from the point of view of understanding the concepts of programming, it was fairy
weak.

If you learn C, it's a significant distance between knowing C and being able to simulate
a pendulum, for example. Whereas, in Mathematica, if you know the concepts, it is
very easy to go and apply that to your physics course right away.

One of the areas that I am most enthusiastic about in terms of the educational
development of Mathematica, is this area of using Mathematica as an educational
programming language. I am particularly hopeful that over the next couple of years,
there will be a number of books which will help present Mathematica as an
educational programming language. My own take on how these things are taught right
now is that, increasingly, courses are starting to be taught in scientific computing.
Mathematica is definitely a language that should be used for that. It would be crazy to
use anything else at present.

PW: The argument you will get from the computer science department will be, "Our
students are not going to be using this language to program when they get out in the
real world."

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SW: I think that's not really a valid argument. First of all, 20% of the users of
Mathematica are computer scientists. If you look at the software development
companies, I would say that all of the big ones have significant numbers of copies of
Mathematica. All of them use it, particularly for prototyping algorithms. When they
are building the final production version of something, they'll often translate it into C
and use low-level stuff. But in terms of algorithm prototyping and understanding the
structure of algorithms and programs, Mathematica is not only a good tool to use, it is
also the tool that actually is being used.

Another argument that people give is, "Gosh, the students should really understand at
a low level what the computer is doing." Well, I don't disagree about that. You can also
say that about all kinds of technical areas. You can say that about mathematics. People
shouldn't use calculators because they should understand at a low level how to do
square roots and so on. Well, my contention is that the way you really understand how
to do square roots is by using a calculator and seeing what happens, and that after you
really understand what good they are and have experimented with them, then you are
finally motivated to maybe ask, "How did the calculator manage to do this
calculation?" In the case of square roots, I don't know! I never learned how to take
square roots by hand. A couple of times in my life I have studied the algorithm for
doing this to implement on the computer, but it is not something I remember or think
is significant.

The same thing is true in computing. Knowing how memory allocation is done is
something that, once you've used computing a lot, you could then get interested to see
what the foundations are. If every time we wrote a program, we had to think about
what would be the physical addresses that our program will be loaded into memory at
—or worse, what voltages would be going high and low in certain transistors in the
microprocessor—we wouldn't get anywhere. The thing that has made computing really
take off is the fact that software can be built in layers, and you can assume that there is
a lower layer which you really don't have to worry about.

It would be extremely foolish for the students to decide that this layering effect of
software is a bad thing. Quite to the contrary, in terms of understanding, I think the
things which are most valuable to teach in a computer science course are the concepts
of programming, and those are not well taught by going down to the level of
transistors, or for that matter, to the level of C or Pascal.

I must say that I am not a great enthusiast of the academic computer science world.
There certainly are some really good things which border on mathematics that are
being done there, but I think it is a sign of the weakness of the field when its major
concern is defending itself from the outside world. Those fields like physics for
instance, that are really quite self-confident and at peace with themselves, don't worry
a hell of a lot about defending themselves from statements such as, "This isn't physics,
it's engineering, or something else."

PW: Well, I think you have to remember that computer science is a very young
discipline.

SW: It is, but I think it's made a lot of mistakes on the way. They worry, "How can we
teach people about commercial software," for example, even though commercial
software is what it's about in the world at large. To teach students a toy spreadsheet is
stupid. You might as well teach them 1-2-3® or Excel®, because that's what they'll be
using.

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It is a strange and somewhat unhealthy feature of computer science that it is mostly
trying to defend itself from the real world, rather than thinking about how it can
contribute to the progress of the real world and to educate students to interact with
that world.

PW: What are the changes that you envision for Mathematica and Wolfram Research
in the next five years?

SW: Certainly our strategy with Mathematica over the years to come will go in several
tracks; one of those tracks will be to push the programming language part of
Mathematica as a separate entity, independent of the mathematical and calculational
capabilities of the system. How exactly that will play out in the computer industry and
what all of the arrangements and licensing issues will be, we don't yet know.

One of the issues I mentioned earlier was this whole question about interactive
documents—Mathematica Notebooks built on top of Mathematica—and how those
things will develop. One of the big issues is, when people write these things, how are
they going to be distributed? With MathSource we started trying to address that issue.
I think one of the things that we'll see is this notion of publishing with Mathematica.
This will be increasingly important. In the educational arena, this migration from
printed textbooks to on-line Mathematica Notebooks will be something that we'll see
in the next few years.

In terms of Mathematica itself, there will certainly be incremental improvements in

the details of the algorithms. There are a number of things that will get developed, such
as typesetting capabilities, and so on.

One of the things we've seen in education recently, is a transition from use on
individual machines to the existence of educational labs that could have Mathematica
running on all the machines. Now, finally, we're getting to the point where the
generally used machines which exist in universities are powerful enough to run
Mathematica. That hasn't been true until recently. There are a number of things that
one will see changing as we adapt, both technologically and from a business point of
view, to an environment where that's possible.

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