On Thursday 17 November 2005 03:36 pm, Geza Giedke wrote:
On 11/17/05, Steven T. Hatton
wrote:
Can you provide substance to this accusation? All human beings have faults. One, or even a few episodes of bad behavior do not a tyrant make. I may be knocking on his door soon.
not that I'd want to subscribe to OP's characterization, but the epsiode of a related in the following review of Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" (treatment by the author of one of his students, who, it seems, proved the most important theorem in ANKoS) is (to say the least) not nice.
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ (The review is worth reading, too, IMHO)
There seem to be a good number of allegations in the review which are unsubstantiated. I don't know the details of Cook's work. Nor do I know anything about the law suit. It may be the case that Wolfram was more concerned with protecting the marketability of Mathematica than his own glory. I find the notion that a person could hold a patten on a theorem in mathematics pattenly absurd. I have ANKoS, and have read some of the introductory material, as well as thumbed through it. I agree that he has a large estimation of the importance of his own work. I suspect there is much of worth in the book, even if there is less there that is original than he contends there to be. The author of the review has certainly ground an axe with Wolfram's name on it for some time. I find the title of the review "A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity" indicative of the seriousness with which I should take it's allegations. Steven