Idea Makers is charming and not for everyone. Its introduction is accurate:
in my own life I”ve seen all sorts of ideas and other things develop over the course of years—which has given me some intuition about how such things work. And one of the important lessons is that however brilliant one may be, every idea is the result of some progression or path—often hard won. If there seems to be a jump in the story—a missing link—then that’s just because one hasn’t figured it out.
The book is also pleasant because Wolfram does not adhere to the false art-science dichotomy. He’s “spent most of my life working hard to build the future with science and technology.” At the same time, “two of my other great interests are history and people.” Idea Makers covers all four and to some extent asks where good ideas come from. Wolfram has met numerous interesting, unusual, and special people, and his stories are close the ideal ones you’d hear in a bar after two drinks.
Some sections introduce ideas that are counterintuitive or that I wasn’t aware of, like “mathematicians—despite their reputation for abstract generality—like most scientists, tend to concentrate on questions that their methods succeed with.” From this one might think the best way forward is to concentrate on developing new methods, or applying old methods to radically different fields. The quality of someone’s work may also not be apparent immediately, which is a better-known idea but still finds itself here: “At the time… Turing’s work did not make much of a splash, probably largely because the emphasis of Cambridge mathematics was elsewhere.”
Other thinkers were different: John von Neumann, for example, “was not particularly one to buck the system: he liked the social milieu of science and always seemed to take both intellectual and other authority seriously.”
Despite his successes, [George] Boole seems to have always thought of himself as a self-taught schoolteacher, rather than a member of the academic elite. And perhaps that helped in his ability to take intellectual risks. Whether it was playing fast and loose with differential operators in calculus, or finding ways to bend the laws of algebra so they could apply to logic, Boole seems to have always taken the attitude of just moving forward and seeing where he could go, trusting his own sense of what was correct and true.
Measuring the extent to which a person admires or respects received authorities / hierarchies against the extent to which a person disregards them could be an interesting project.
Each section of Idea Makers covers someone in science, math, or technology. This is not amenable to quotation, but each section feels the appropriate length and like it has the appropriate focus.
Some facts are simply tragic. Ada Lovelave died from what was likely cervical cancer; today the HPV vaccine largely protects its recipients from that disease. Most deaths are tragic on a local level; Ada Lovelace’s death is tragic on a global level, given how much she contributed and how much more she might have contributed.
Refreshingly, the quality of the physical book—its paper and binding—is unusually high, maybe because it’s put out by Wolfram Press: The company cares about longevity and quality in a way that most commercial publishers would do well to emulate. Stephen Wolfram himself often consults centuries-old pages, and in one illustration we see him using an iPhone to photograph an artifact. It is not a stretch to imagine him imagining someone photographing (or using some other advanced technology) to photograph the work he publishes today.