3 ms·

> 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 n

> 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.

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.