Posts from 2017

A New Kind of Science: A 15-Year View

Starting now, in celebration of its 15th anniversary, A New Kind of Science will be freely available in its entirety, with high-resolution images, on the web or for download.

A New Kind of Science

It’s now 15 years since I published my book A New Kind of Science—more than 25 since I started writing it, and more than 35 since I started working towards it. But with every passing year I feel I understand more about what the book is really about—and why it’s important. I wrote the book, as its title suggests, to contribute to the progress of science. But as the years have gone by, I’ve realized that the core of what’s in the book actually goes far beyond science—into many areas that will be increasingly important in defining our whole future. Continue reading

Machine Learning for Middle Schoolers

(An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language is available in print, as an ebook, and free on the web—as well as in Wolfram Programming Lab in the Wolfram Open Cloud. There’s also now a free online hands-on course based on it.)

An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language

A year ago I published

a book entitled An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language—as part of my effort to teach computational thinking to the next generation. I just published the second edition of the book—with (among other things) a significantly extended section on modern machine learning.

I originally expected my book’s readers would be high schoolers and up. But it’s actually also found a significant audience among middle schoolers (11- to 14-year-olds). So the question now is: can one teach the core concepts of modern machine learning even to middle schoolers? Well, the interesting thing is that—thanks to the whole technology stack we’ve now got in the Wolfram Language—the answer seems to be “yes”! Continue reading