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That's a reasonable question.. I think it's worth considering the users of Mathematica as near or overlapping. It might be possible to go through GitHub and fi

That's a reasonable question.. I think it's worth considering the users of Mathematica as near or overlapping. It might be possible to go through GitHub and find the number of Mathematica projects and then categorize them to get an approximation. Also, this is very tenuous, but I see a lot of similarity between Wolfram's automata (not this new work) and Lattice Boltzmann methods. Both have been around since the 70s/80s and it makes me wonder a little about primacy but a lot about where he's gotten to with all this. Very intriguing

morelisp 5y ago
> I think it's worth considering the users of Mathematica as near or overlapping. Mathematica predates any kind of statement of NKS by over a decade (and SMP nearly a decade before that). Moreover, I don't see any evidence Mathematica is becoming more "NKS-y" over time; it's a usual sort of moribund enterprise tooling, just for a highly selective enterprise. I don't see any real connection, other than some possible post-hoc handwaving. Coming from the other side, Mathematica's relevance to modern physics seems at a 10-20 year nadir. (E.g. from what I can tell it missed the boat entirely on the data-crunching nature of many modern experiments, and its proprietary nature makes it difficult to integrate into increasingly-complex pipelines.) So if NKS - a theory of physics - is being researched, it's either having little success or it's not related to Mathematica use.
- pmayrgundter 5y ago
  I didn't know about SMP. Cool! Yeah, NKS clearly came after Mathematica, but I think there's a strong through-line there that goes back to his early work and connects directly to this meta-math stuff he's doing now. The core language is a pattern matching substitution system, and that's what he eventually distills into his 1d automata and then generalizes to meta-math. "at the core of Mathematica is the notion of storing collections of rules in which each rule specifies how to transform all pieces of data that are similar enough to match a single Mathematica pattern. And the success of Mathematica provides considerable evidence for the power of this kind of approach." https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p627--human-thinking/ https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p627--human-thinking/ It's been a while since I read NKS but I recall him saying he started playing with automata earlier and getting some of the ideas for NKS then, but then did Wolfram Research/Mathematica for some time while he was noodling. I think that's kinda supported by his timeline: https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/notes-1-4--timeline/ Indeed there is not much for Mathematica physics on GitHub: 7,833 repos using Mathematica [1] 363 repos of that containing "physics" [2] I expect that's a pretty heavy undercount as they've not pursued open-source. That's disappointing to me and I agree they missed out on a lot; I think those two are strongly connected. But also he kept his business afloat and did crazy (good) science on the side. Did find this though. Looks neat! https://github.com/FeynCalc/feyncalc https://github.com/FeynCalc/feyncalc maintained by: https://github.com/vsht https://github.com/vsht [1] https://github.com/search?q=language%3AMathematica&type=Repositories https://github.com/search?q=language%3AMathematica&type=Repo... [2] https://github.com/search?q=language%3AMathematica+physics&type=Repositories https://github.com/search?q=language%3AMathematica+physics&t...
  - morelisp 5y ago
    I think you'll get a more accurate view of things reading contemporary sources than his post-hoc justifications of why Mathematica was really NKS all along. If anything, Mathematica also missed the boat on proof assistants, which it should have totally nailed - so if anything, any NKS ideology embodied in Mathematica held it back here as the field verged to being grounded in type theory. (But more likely - ordinary large codebase too difficult to adapt.) I don't think GitHub will be able to tell you much about how physicists are working one way or another. Physicists in general, and also mathematicians and researching engineers who I suspect make up the bulk of most Mathematica users, don't use GitHub.

morelisp 5y ago

> I think it's worth considering the users of Mathematica as near or overlapping. Mathematica predates any kind of statement of NKS by over a decade (and SMP nearly a decade before that). Moreover, I don't see any evidence Mathematica is becoming more "NKS-y" over time; it's a usual sort of moribund enterprise tooling, just for a highly selective enterprise. I don't see any real connection, other than some possible post-hoc handwaving. Coming from the other side, Mathematica's relevance to modern physics seems at a 10-20 year nadir. (E.g. from what I can tell it missed the boat entirely on the data-crunching nature of many modern experiments, and its proprietary nature makes it difficult to integrate into increasingly-complex pipelines.) So if NKS - a theory of physics - is being researched, it's either having little success or it's not related to Mathematica use.

pmayrgundter 5y ago
I didn't know about SMP. Cool! Yeah, NKS clearly came after Mathematica, but I think there's a strong through-line there that goes back to his early work and connects directly to this meta-math stuff he's doing now. The core language is a pattern matching substitution system, and that's what he eventually distills into his 1d automata and then generalizes to meta-math. "at the core of Mathematica is the notion of storing collections of rules in which each rule specifies how to transform all pieces of data that are similar enough to match a single Mathematica pattern. And the success of Mathematica provides considerable evidence for the power of this kind of approach." https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p627--human-thinking/ https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p627--human-thinking/ It's been a while since I read NKS but I recall him saying he started playing with automata earlier and getting some of the ideas for NKS then, but then did Wolfram Research/Mathematica for some time while he was noodling. I think that's kinda supported by his timeline: https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/notes-1-4--timeline/ Indeed there is not much for Mathematica physics on GitHub: 7,833 repos using Mathematica [1] 363 repos of that containing "physics" [2] I expect that's a pretty heavy undercount as they've not pursued open-source. That's disappointing to me and I agree they missed out on a lot; I think those two are strongly connected. But also he kept his business afloat and did crazy (good) science on the side. Did find this though. Looks neat! https://github.com/FeynCalc/feyncalc https://github.com/FeynCalc/feyncalc maintained by: https://github.com/vsht https://github.com/vsht [1] https://github.com/search?q=language%3AMathematica&type=Repositories https://github.com/search?q=language%3AMathematica&type=Repo... [2] https://github.com/search?q=language%3AMathematica+physics&type=Repositories https://github.com/search?q=language%3AMathematica+physics&t...
- morelisp 5y ago
  I think you'll get a more accurate view of things reading contemporary sources than his post-hoc justifications of why Mathematica was really NKS all along. If anything, Mathematica also missed the boat on proof assistants, which it should have totally nailed - so if anything, any NKS ideology embodied in Mathematica held it back here as the field verged to being grounded in type theory. (But more likely - ordinary large codebase too difficult to adapt.) I don't think GitHub will be able to tell you much about how physicists are working one way or another. Physicists in general, and also mathematicians and researching engineers who I suspect make up the bulk of most Mathematica users, don't use GitHub.