Ask a Tech Teacher

OCTOBER 23, 2019

Bright Science is a free YouTube channel of over 1300 study videos for high schoolers (or precocious middle schoolers). Most are about five minutes (some longer, some shorter) and cover topics like chemistry, physics, calculus, geometry, biology, Algebra, trigonometry, grammar, ACT prep, and SAT prep.

Education 154

Education Education Earth science Government 154

Stephen Wolfram

JANUARY 31, 2023

He’s writing a paper, he says, basically to clarify the Second Law, (or, as he calls it, “the second fundamental theorem”—rather confidently asserting that he will “prove this theorem”): Part of the issue he’s trying to address is how the calculus is done: The partial derivative symbol ∂ had been introduced in the late 1700s.

Energy 89

Energy Physics Argumentation Mathematics 89

Stephen Wolfram

SEPTEMBER 23, 2021

Could it really be that this was the secret that nature had been using all along to make complexity? But it really wasn’t physics, or computer science, or math, or biology, or economics, or any known field. Sometimes I’ve thought of ruliology as being at first a bit like natural history. But at least it would have a home.

Computer 55

Computer Mathematics Sciences Science 55

Stephen Wolfram

NOVEMBER 10, 2021

The global structures of metamathematics , economics , linguistics and evolutionary biology seem likely to provide examples—and in each case we can expect that at the core is the ruliad, with its unique structure. But what about other models of computation—like cellular automata or register machines or lambda calculus?

Physics 116

Physics Mathematics Computer Construction 116

Stephen Wolfram

FEBRUARY 14, 2023

It’s not obvious that it would be feasible to find the path of the steepest descent on the “weight landscape” But calculus comes to the rescue. It turns out that the chain rule of calculus in effect lets us “unravel” the operations done by successive layers in the neural net.

Computer 145

Computer Architecture Mathematics Construction 145

Stephen Wolfram

MARCH 7, 2022

And if we’re going to make a “general theory of mathematics” a first step is to do something like we’d typically do in natural science, and try to “drill down” to find a uniform underlying model—or at least representation—for all of them. There were some areas to which I was pretty sure the methods of A New Kind of Science would apply.

Mathematics 114

Mathematics Physics Computer Algebra 114