OK, computation

'It seems like Nature has some secret that lets it make complicated stuff in an effortless way,' Stephen Wolfram recently told an audience at Oxford University's Mathematical Institute. In his talk, that you can now watch online , Wolfram, the scientist behind Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha , explored how advances in computation could benefit mathematics. One of the key ideas he put forward was ' computational irreducibility ' - the idea that some computations cannot be sped up by any shortcut, the only way to figure out what is going to happen is to simulate each step. 'People sometimes say that the reason the mathematics that we have is the way it is, is because that's what we need to describe the natural world, I think that's just not true,' he commented. He suggested that much of the reason mathematics covers the areas it does is historical, building on work begun by the first mathematicians in ancient Babylon. Computational irreducibility, he said, is a 'junior version of 'undecidability'' - the idea that when you ask the question of what will ultimately happen the answer is something that is undecidable. Whilst there are over three million theorems in mathematics these are all things that turned out to be decidable/provable.