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?

...All the wonders of our universe can in effect be captured by simple rules, yet ... there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules, except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold.

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.

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.

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?

What I realized is that if we're going to be able to have a theory about what happens in, for example, nature there has to ultimately be some rule by which nature operates. But the issue is does that rule have to correspond to something like a mathematical equation, something that we have sort of created in our human mathematics? And what I realized is that now with our understanding of computation and computer programs and so on, there is actually a much bigger universe of possible rules to describe the natural world than just the mathematical equation kinds of things.