Duration : 03:38:43
Stephen Wolfram, computer scientist, mathematician and founder of Wolfram Research, discusses the concept of complexity in nature and how it inspired him to seek a scientific basis for complicated structures such as snowflakes, galaxies, and living systems. He found that using programs to represent systems was a good way to build models of what happens in nature, and this led him to study cellular automata, which are lines of cells each consisting of black or white colors, following rules that determine the color of a cell based on the previous step. Wolframs approach to modeling complex systems using simple rules has opened up new areas of research in mathematics and physics.