Those of us interested in the position of mathematics in public culture could not help but be impressed a few weeks back, when the No. 1 spot on Amazon’s best-seller list was briefly occupied not by ...

EXTRAORDINARY claims demand extraordinary proof, and the claims made by Stephen Wolfram, a computer scientist, in his new book are extraordinary indeed. “A New Kind of Science” professes to offer an ...

It’s been more than ten years now since the idea emerged of using chaos to encrypt messages. The approach is straightforward. Start with a message, superimpose it on a chaotic signal and send. If the ...

Once dismissed as a relic of the Middle Ages, the spirit of metaphysical speculation is alive and well -- in computer science. Over candlelight in cathedrals and monkish cells, medieval metaphysicians ...

Plenty of people claim to have theories that will revolutionize science. What’s rare is for other scientists to take one of these schemes seriously. Yet that’s what’s happened since May 2002 when ...

In his controversial 2002 book A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media), theoretical physicist Stephen Wolfram proposed that traditional science is incapable of fathoming many important phenomena in ...

Gliders are important because they transmit information in this virtual world. They also do interesting things. When gliders collide, they can form more complex objects such as glider guns. When they ...