Math Every Day

A conversion experience, written up while it was still warm: the essay opens with "I just read a book," and everything after that has the energy of a man who put the book down and started typing. Steve was at Amazon in late 2004, writing for coworkers rather than a public audience, and the piece is half great-man fan letter, half self-indictment. The fan letter is infectious. Von Neumann learns meteorology from scratch because accurate 24-hour forecasts strike him as an interesting problem; Einstein gets written off as a whiner who "didn't even know EJB." There is also a fine detour through the age of human computers, including the three men who spent five months in 1757 hand-computing the orbit of Halley's Comet, only to miss its perihelion by a month. The worship runs hot, though: Johnny "singlehandedly" invents things throughout, and nobody else who worked on the stored-program computer gets a syllable, so readers who know that history should brace for it. Wolfram gets slapped twice, which balances the ledger some.

The complaint underneath has aged in an odd direction. Steve's real target is the sequential machine itself, and the future he pines for — parallel computers grown from neural networks and cellular automata, the project von Neumann was chasing when he died at 54 — is the one wish here that has since half-arrived, which makes the rant read stranger now than it did in 2004. Near the end the whole argument compresses into a single deflating sentence about what "software engineering" actually is; that one is best met in place. A postscript points to Steve's all-time favorite Amazon customer review, of Wolfram's book, as a parting gift.