The thing that got me started on the science that I've been building now for about 20 years or so was the question of okay, if mathematical equations can't make progress in understanding complex phenomena in the natural world, how might we make progress?

People have been trying to do kind of natural language processing with computers for decades and there has only been sort of slow progress in that in general. It turned out the problem we had to solve is sort of the reverse of the problem people usually have to solve. People usually have to solve the problem of you're given you know thousands, millions of pages of text, go have the computer understand this.

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today.

So the thing I realized rather gradually - I must say starting about 20 years ago now that we know about computers and things - there's a possibility of a more general basis for rules to describe nature.

Well, the first thing to say is that we've worked hard to maintain compatibility, so that any program written with an earlier version of Mathematica can run without change in 3.0, and any notebook can be converted.

The thing that got me started on the science that I've been building now for about 20 years or so was the question of okay, if mathematical equations can't make progress in understanding complex phenomena in the natural world, how might we make progress?

The fact that the same symbolic programming primitives work for those as work for math kinds of things, I think, really validates the idea of symbolic programming being something pretty general.