14 DAY TRIAL // Stephen Wolfram has posted ‘a few memories’ about Steve Jobs on his blog, revealing that his Mathematica project has been influenced by the Apple co-founder’s clear way of thinking.
Wolfram gained notoriety in the ‘80s when he showed off his computational software called Mathematica.
The tool later got embedded in every NeXT computer. This had led to a number of discussions between Wolfram and Jobs (who had created the company called NeXT), one of which was about the actual name of the service.
Wolfram explains how he ended up being convinced by Jobs to name it Mathematica, saying, “I’d actually considered that name, but rejected it. I asked Steve why he thought it was good, and he told me his theory for a name was to start from the generic term for something, then romanticize it.”
“His favorite example at the time was Sony’s Trinitron. Well, it went back and forth for a while. But in the end I agreed that, yes, Mathematica was a good name. And so it has been now for nearly 24 years,” says Wolfram.
He continues, revealing that Jobs had a great deal of interaction with Mathematica as it was being developed, but that he had trouble putting it to good use.
“He always claimed he didn’t understand the math of it (though I later learned from a good friend of mine who had known Steve in high school that Steve had definitely taken at least one calculus course).”
However, Steve’s clear thinking would soon reveal itself in the understanding of its potential, not the nuts and bolts:
“But he made all sorts of ‘make it simpler’ suggestions about the interface and the documentation,” Wolfram continues.
“With one slight exception, perhaps of at least curiosity interest to Mathematica aficionados: he suggested that cells in Mathematica notebook documents (now CDFs) should be indicated not by simple vertical lines—but instead by Brackets with little serifs at their ends. And as it happens, that idea opened the way to thinking of hierarchies of cells, and ultimately to many features of symbolic documents,” he writes.
And this is, of course, just one example of how Jobs contributed to Wolfram's end product.
Editor’s note This is precisely what Jobs was all about - detail. However, Jobs would think 'detail' only where it was needed to make something more usable, more intuitive or, simply put, more human. Wolfram, again, explains:
“To me, Steve Jobs stands out most for his clarity of thought. Over and over again he took complex situations, understood their essence, and used that understanding to make a bold definitive move, often in a completely unexpected direction.”