Word: wolfram
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Unless, that is, the author is Stephen Wolfram. Back in the 1980s, Wolfram was one of the hottest young scientists around. He got his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1979 at the astonishing age of 20. A year later, he became the youngest person ever to receive a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He went on to write a scientific computing program called Mathematica that was so successful it made him a millionaire many times over. And then he dropped out of public view. What ever happened, people wondered, to Stephen Wolfram...
...they know. This week Wolfram is publishing A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media), a 1,200-page tome, some two decades in the making, that claims to redefine the foundations of virtually every branch of science, from physics and mathematics to biology and even psychology. "Stephen is not a modest man," says Terrence Sejnowski, director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., who is an avid Wolfram watcher. "But his ideas could turn out to be extremely important...
Suddenly, Wilson's narrative jumps away from this unhappy family and back to 1941 Berlin, where an industrialist named Klaus Felsen is being persuaded, none too gently, to abandon his railroad-coupling factory and take on an important assignment for the Nazis. The Third Reich needs vast amounts of wolfram, i.e., tungsten, to use as an alloy in solid-core ammunition, essential for tank warfare, and the present supply from China will cease once Hitler breaks his nonaggression pact with Stalin. Portugal has wolfram, and Felsen speaks Portuguese, a memento from his past affair with a Brazilian woman. Ergo, Felsen...
...that Terfel "is not a guy who is pretentious and insists on his own way." On Terfel's wish list are parts like Falstaff, Nick Shadow in The Rake's Progress and Escamillo in Carmen. His first Wagner, probably at the Met, will be the comparatively light role of Wolfram in Tannhauser, with its lyrical ode to the evening star -- cat's cream to a baritone with Terfel's plush tone...
...Wolfram Research has released a new version of its popular Mathematica system in a native Power Macintosh format, and it is here that the new CPU architecture really shines...