Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science” arrived earlier this year in a blizzard of hype. As significant as the works of Newton and Darwin, said breathless touts, and the author seems to agree.
Mathematics
The shell of the textile cone snail, which resembles a pattern produced by cellular automata • Photo by Richard Ling (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Chester Raymo Sr. (1909-1974) at his desk • © Raymo Family Archive
A life graphed to conclusion
Someone asked me the other day why I became a scientist.
A sculpture honoring Alan Turing • Photo by Steve Parker (CC BY 2.0)
A giant of logic lost to the irrational
“Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash
Finnegans Wake and Dr. Seuss
Which of the following strings of letters do you find most interesting?
Image by Alexandra from Pixabay
The ways of a crow — that’s calculus in motion
A crow in a snowy dawn. It hopped into the air, imprinting the snow with its black-fingered wings.
Photo by Lukas from Pexels
Don’t confuse statistics with reality
As I went off to college in 1954 my father handed me a little orange book and said, “Read this. It will be as useful as anything you’ll learn in college.”
Image by athree23 from Pixabay
True nature of math remains, in sum, a mystery
If you are afflicted with math anxiety, you may not like what I’m about to say.
Mandelbrot set image created by Wolfgang Beyer (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Mandelbrot’s got our number
For the jacket of my collection of science essays, the publisher proposed a representation of the Mandelbrot set, a computer-generated mathematical pattern of wonderful complexity, one of a family of patterns called fractals.
Photo by Orin Zebest (CC BY 2.0)
The age-old gum ball conundrum
How many gum balls can you fit into a gum ball machine? And does it matter?
A plot of Lorenz's strange attractor • Image by Wikimol & Dschwen (CC BY-SA 3.0)
A little loop of chaos
“So what’s this little loop on the back of the shirt?” I pointed to the cloth loop sewn into the yoke below the collar.