Conrad Wolfram Quotes

The computers are not replacing mathematicians; they are breeding them.

Calculating does not equal mathematics. It's a subsection of it. In years gone by it was the limiting factor, but computers now allow you to make the whole of mathematics more intellectual.

Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.

I do think in numbers. My mind works that way.

The ultimate goal of mathematics is to eliminate all need for intelligent thought.

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.

Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.

Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician.

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

It's my belief that you can take everyone down a logical path if you take them slowly enough, and the trouble is that mathematical brains can get scrambled a little bit on the way. You get a bad teacher, it messes you up for the rest of the journey.

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.

What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.

One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.

Most of the people that I went to school with - I went to secondary school - we were educated to go and work in the line at Ford's, and if we were lucky, technical skilled labor. I sort of rejected that, and thought I wanted to do something else.

Every math curriculum in the world is based on the idea of hand-calculating, and most of what you're teaching is how to calculate. And I think the resistance to this is very variable.

The day may come when we will replace politicians with computers. Judging from some of the reasoning of politicians I've seen over the years, I know I would sooner take the logic of a computer. The machine may suffer the same lack of intelligence as some politicians, but at least there is consistency in its idiocy.

None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers …. People are getting from A to B and it's not clear how they are getting there....

The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation.

The idea [of the Quantum Computer] is to create a machine that is as intelligence as humans, and probably much more so.

The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value.

This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.

Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There's more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it's awfully close to human.

My dad is a mathematician; I think we both have that problem-solving, looking-for-patterns way of thinking.