computational, and to need the services of algorithms and of Mathematica. It was a very clean statement of a vision which has indeed worked out as he predicted. (And now it’s nice when I hear through the grapevine that there are all sorts of algorithms central to the iPhone that were developed with the help of Mathematica.)
A while later, the NeXT was duly released, and a copy of Mathematica was bundled with every computer. Although the NeXT was not in its own right a commercial success, Steve’s decision to bundle Mathematica turned out to be a really good idea, and was often quoted as the #1 reason people had bought NeXTs.
And as a curious footnote to history (which I learned years later), one batch of NeXTs bought for the purpose of running Mathematica went to CERN in Geneva, Switzerland—where they ended having no less distinction than being the computers on which the web was first developed.
I used to see Steve Jobs with some regularity in those days. One time I went to see him in NeXT’s swank new offices in Redwood City. I particularly wanted to talk to him about Mathematica as a computer language. He always preferred user interfaces to languages, but he was trying to be helpful. The conversation was going on, but he said he couldn’t go to dinner, and actually he was quite distracted, because he was going out on a date that evening—and he hadn’t been on a date for a long time. He explained that he’d just met the woman he was seeing a few days earlier, and was very nervous about his date. The Steve Jobs—so confident as a businessman and technologist—had melted away, and he was asking me—hardly a noted known authority on such things—about his date.
As it turned out, the date apparently worked out—and within 18 months the woman he met became his wife, and remained so until the end.
My direct interactions with Steve Jobs decreased during the decade that I was for all practical purposes a hermit working on A New Kind of Science. For most of that time, though, I used a NeXT computer in almost every waking hour—and in fact my main discoveries were made on it. And when the book was finished, Steve asked for a pre-release copy, which I duly sent.
At the time, all sorts of people were telling me that I needed to put quotes on the back cover of the book. So I asked Steve Jobs if he’d give me one. Various questions came back. But eventually Steve said, “Isaac Newton didn’t have back-cover quotes; why do you want them?” And that’s how, at the last minute, the back cover of A New Kind of Science ended up with just a simple and elegant array of pictures. Another contribution from Steve Jobs, that I notice every time I look at my big book.
In my life, I have had the good fortune to interact with all sorts of talented people. 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.
I myself have spent much of my life—in science and in technology—trying to work in somewhat similar ways. And trying to build the very best possible things I can.
Yet looking at the practical world of technology and business there are certainly times
