History of Science & Technology Q&A (September 18, 2024)

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Why is history important? - History is very good at preventing humanity from making the same mistakes. - How would you explain the history of pi? - Do we know why Brahmagupta came up with the rules for arithmetic and algebra with zero and negative quantities? His book does appear to be a discontinuous jump in understanding. - Do you know if there was any physical reason that the Greek "elements" were associated with particular geometric shapes? - The Pi Day thing is great; I think I might get a shirt. - To what extent did your own path/work intersect the heydays of Bell Labs and notable people therefrom? - Did you ever use an Amiga computer? - With mobile devices we are basically going back to terminals. - ​​I used to have a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 sitting on my desk for AutoCAD and 3D modeling. Those were great machines and fun times! - Speaking of McCarthy and those days, do you think that sticking to s-expressions as opposed to m-expressions and Wolfram Language-style ones impeded Lisp's adoption historically?