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Mixed feelings about this article: 1. A fine easy read about Ramanujan and Hardy. It was well-summarized and nicely written, with excellent pictures that I had
by johnloeber 10y ago
Mixed feelings about this article:
1. A fine easy read about Ramanujan and Hardy. It was well-summarized and nicely written, with excellent pictures that I had not seen before.
2. A disgusting vein of self-promotion runs throughout the article. Much has been said about Stephan Wolfram's occasionally self-centered behavior, and many of his writings have a self-aggrandizing tone to them. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised to find the piece start out with little self-reference by the author, until:
> The other, slightly more famous, track — less austere and less mathematically oriented — was Eton and Oxford, which happens to be where I went.
How is that relevant in an article titled Who was Ramanujan? It got worse a few paragraphs later, as Wolfram began discussing numeric approximations, and engaging in what was effectively product placement for WolframAlpha and Mathematica. There I was, trying to read about Ramanujan, and Wolfram kept interjecting with comments about his computation engine and his implementations of Ramanujan's formulae.
Toward the end of the article, after the biography of Ramanujan was complete and Wolfram turned to discussing expansions of Ramanujan's results, such topics were fair game. "What if Ramanujan had had Mathematica?" is a valid question. Discussing cellular automata and Wolfram's principle of computational equivalence, etc., etc. was fine at that point, since these are valid expansions to the topic at hand.
Nonetheless, the blatant product placement and continuous breaking of the flow of the text to push some function implemented in WolframAlpha on the reader was extraordinarily annoying, and, frankly, deeply disappointing. If Wolfram sets out to write the unlikely tale of a mysterious letter, and its place in the history of mathematics, as advertised by the subtitle, then I would have hoped that he could leave his egregious self-advertising to the end of the article -- or better yet -- to a separate one altogether.
- x5n1 10y agoI previously wrote here how on his Wikipedia page there is nothing about his family other than some vague reference. A user below pointed out this was because of his fear for his family's privacy. Which is fair enough.
- johnloeber 10y agoWhat does that have to do with anything?
- x5n1 10y ago-
- johnloeber 10y agoI think that might just be a (perfectly reasonable) desire for privacy... he is a fairly public figure, after all.
- tzs 10y agoAre you implying that he wrote his own Wikipedia page? In a 1997 article in Technology Review, the author said that Wolfram politely deflected personal questions about his wife and newborn child out of privacy concerns prompted by the Unabomber case.
- enthdegree 10y agoIt is not out of the question that Stephen Wolfram, if it is not he himself, does indeed have some publicists policing his Wikipedia article. Compare the edit statistics of Stephen's page: https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-articleinfo/?article=Stephen_Wolfram&project=en.wikipedia.org https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-articleinfo/?article=Stephe... ...to those of the page of an arguably even more famous research scientist, Terence Tao: https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-articleinfo/?article=Terence_Tao&project=en.wikipedia.org https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-articleinfo/?article=Terenc... Notice that, (as might be reasonable to expect of many Wikipedia articles), Terence's page experienced rapid growth a few years after it's creation, then received sustained updates over time. In contrast, Stephen's page does not display this trend at all and is rather bursty. Also notice that whereas the top editors of Tao's page are evenly distributed among many users, on Stephen's page nearly 10% of the edits and a quarter of the text comes from one editor who happens to have been affiliated with Wolfram Research. Of course this is all anecdotal evidence and eyeball statistics at best.
- 10y ago
- carlob 10y agoSo what?
- blt 10y agoI can barely tolerate anything he writes. It is hard to understand how a person could reach his position without learning how to express himself tastefully. Funny to read this after reading the Claude Shannon profile posted a few hours ago [1]. An actual giant of 20th century mathematics, and so humble. [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/claude-shannon-tinkerer-prankster-and-father-of-information-theory http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/claude-shannon-t...
- johnloeber 10y agoIt is hard to understand, indeed. Wolfram is clearly extremely accomplished by all standards. We all know this. Why in the world does he pump all his written work with insufferable self-promotion? Anyone in a position to make good use of Mathematica has heard of it. I haven't met anyone who doesn't know about WolframAlpha, and I've taught mathematics to high-schoolers. Moreover, it should be obvious to Wolfram that his incessant self-promotion greatly reduces the probability that a reader will recommend his writing to their friends -- if Wolfram's goal is to promote his software, research, or even just himself, then he's clearly going about it in a ham-fisted way.
- saiya-jin 10y agomany possible sources - "daddy isues" are on one way or another responsible for more messed up people I've ever met than anything else. it grows on men too, just in different way than ladies - unhealthy competitiveness, never-good-enough syndrome inwards and outwards, never happy with what you have/achieve even if you have billions and fame and recognition. abandoning stable relationships etc... and then there are true extroverts, who just need the feeling of being hot topic, controversial, whatever. to be polite i don't like these so much. of course i don't know him personally, could be different reason but probably somewhere along those lines.
- Jd 10y agoCould be simply that his need to promote his products (i.e. marketing) create a need to self-promote.
- 10y ago
- mvardin 10y agoYour comment appears to be about the article but you seem unable to do so without focusing on yourself. It was all going fine until you wrote "I had not seen before". How is it relevant whether you had seen it before or not? In all, you make four references to yourself and your feelings in this comment. What egregious self-promotion! /sarcasm
- andyjohnson0 10y ago"...Eton and Oxford, which happens to be where I went" I prefer to be charitable and assume that he wrote this for the purposes of disclosure and to qualify his knowledge of those institutions. I don't think he was drawing a comparison between himself and Ramanujan. Yes - Wolfram has a tendency for self-promotion, and this can be a bit tiresome. But, like others who have commented here, I find the seemingly obligatory condemnation of him to be tiresome too. The difference between Wolfram and his detractors on HN is that Wolfram (as well as clearly being very smart) invariably has something interesting to say.
- harperlee 10y agoIt also makes the article more personal, which is something that generally improves communication.
- protomyth 10y agoI can only imagine some of the folks reaction to the old storytellers who constantly interjected their personal experience (and sometime the audiences) into the old stories. It honestly shows how the teller relates to the subject. If I had a mathematical tool or language, I would use it to show the work in a story about a mathematician.
- harperlee 10y agoExactly. In general, relating things to the persons behind them gives a lot of context and clarifies why things end up as they are. Although it doesn't only touch these, "Connections", from James Burke, comes to mind. There was a link here a couple of months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075430).
- aws_ls 10y agoAgree. I read the article from another source, and came to HN expecting that very criticism. Its so tiresome. They didn't even consider that this article by Wolfram took a rare effort to go into lot of Math of Ramanujan. And the core insight of experimental (Ramanujan style) Math vs formal proof oriented (Hardy style) Math and its parallels i.e. the former approach is definitely enabled by Wolfram Mathematica, is very convincing. And to miss all that, and just harp on self promotion by Wolfram is disingenuous or a very stereotypical comment. And its the top HN comment.
- pluteoid 10y agoMy reaction to the article (even the end of it) was "wow, this is far less bombastic and egotistic than Stephen's normal writing, how refreshing." There are lots of books and articles purely about Ramanujan, why not offer something that's more of a personal reflection and interesting/relevant to Mathematica users? Maybe it only seemed good by contrast, but the level here of self-referencing his own background, work, products, interests didn't seem to me to be "disgusting", "extraordinarily annoying" or "deeply disappointing", it all seemed quite nicely tied in.
- mfukar 10y agoIt happens to be where he went. I think you're reading too much into a simple factoid.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sssk 10y agoThe fact that this article was first posted on Wolfram's blog should cut him some slack
- oneloop 10y agoLook up "content marketing"
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoThe great question in artificial intelligence: who will become self-aware first, Wolfram Alpha or Stephen Wolfram?
- 77pt77 10y agoI vote for the silicon entity.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gnufied 10y agoSee I neither agree or disagree with your opinions about wolfram. But by discussing wolfram's character in this thread you have managed to steer entire discussion on wolfram rather than mathematics of Ramanujan. Unfortunately this happens too often in any online discourse, where subject matter is entirely ignored but most of the discussion focuses on tangential stuff. It is especially true when commenting on actual subject matter requires some solid background or research, but somehow many people feel obligated to comment anyways. It is classic low hanging fruit vs contributing something real to the discussion.
- gmantom 10y agoThis is a good point but aren't you doing the same thing? sorry that was a cheeky response. One thing I will say on your point is that this sort of "side" discourse sometimes brings about real good discussion. Maybe the actual article itself dosent spawn anything new or maybe it is too complex for most folks. However, sometimes the comments lead to new articles to explore a "side" idea that came out from the online comments. So many articles I've read lately start with "There was a great discussion on hacker news on this topic I felt obligated to write about it, you can find it here". I think this is healthy.
- brudgers 10y agoTo me it seems, Stephan Wolfram talking about his company with nary a "Wolfram" would approach Knights of Nee don't say it absurdity. His name is on the door and the box. Perhaps there is some vanity behind ̶i̶t̶ that. If so, ̶i̶t̶ the vanity is in the tradition of Ford, Bell, those HP fellows, Cray the supercomputer, and a long line of entrepreneurs. Yet, if the naming is vanity, tis a wan one by Silicon Valley benchmarks, I am thinking of Sherman Fairchild who did not bring the valley to the silicon but instead brought silicon to the valley...and put his cameras in his planes up among the clouds. For me, putting one's name on the door is not just vanity. Doing so also entails taking the-Truman-buck-stops-with-me responsibility. When Wolfram Mathematica produces an erroneous numerical result, I don't search in vane for Bob Pentium and Lawrence K. Intel, I am afforded the convenience of curseing the man Wolfram directly by the intertweetsbook. Irregardless of vanity or responsibility motivations, seems to me that people much prefer writing of their contemporaneous experience than writing of the historical Ramanujan. Curiously evidenced here, is writers love more writing of Wolfram not writing of Ramanujan. Who can blame clever Stephan for combining the two.
- tremendo 10y agoThere's always this discussion about the author, yet recently it was posted here in HM his blog [1] about Ada Lovelace, which I read and enjoyed quite a bit, and of which I don't remember being distracted by any of his self-promotion at all. I do remember "A New Kind of Science", but it's also ok to forgive and forget. [1] http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/ http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-o...
- p4wnc6 10y agoIt kills me how time and again Wolfram writes self-aggrandizing, egotistical articles filled with glib little self-promotional asides, yet so many people seem to jump in to defend him. The Ada Lovelace article he wrote a while back was really egregious, littering it with comparisons to his Wolfram products, talking about how he had seen further than Babbage because of his cellular automata work. Ugh. So detestable. Every time there is a Wolfram post, people rightfully point out his pedantic and self-selling attitude, then other people either argue they didn't perceive it that way, or that they are tired of hearing about it and prefer to bash the people doing the important work of calling Wolfram on it instead of bashing Wolfram himself for it. I'd go further and argue that "What if Ramanujan had had Mathematica?" is ludicrous to appear in an essay like this. It's obviously meant to privilege Wolfram's own products and position them as if they could empower productive and once-in-a-lifetime talented mathematicians, when really few such people would get value from a tool like Mathematica, and who is to say that Ramanujan wouldn't be a supporter of FOSS and boisterously argue that no one should use Mathematica and instead use FOSS tools that approximate it? It's not reasonable to defend Wolfram on this account by saying of course he will promote his own products, or that he could have promoted them even more but chose not to. That's not reasonable because he is setting out to write a historical essay, not a puff piece, it's not about him or his products. Shoehorning them in has no place and it's not forgivable just because "people plug their own products" or something. If you want to plug your products, write a puff piece about your products, not a historical essay.