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 ...

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 ...

Stephen Wolfram was in his Caltech office more than 20 years ago, working late on an autumn evening, when he saw something on his computer screen that shocked and confused him. The 21-year-old ...

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 ...

Soon after it was released a few short years ago, I began to delve into Steven Wolfram's new book, "A Fundamental Theory of Physics." I have followed his work since the early '90s when I first used ...