brainwagon

Over twenty years ago, I first read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which I still consider to be the most amazing computer science textbook ever written. I’ve known for a while that one of the author’s, Gerald Sussman has written a book on classical mechanics called (appropriately enough) Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics. What’s cool is that the entire text is online. I got reminded of this while watching this lecture by Sussman on the occasion of Dan Friedman’s 60th Birthday.

I must admit that most of the physics (and a great deal of the math) is over my head, but basically he’s talking about the systematic representation of knowledge (in this case, physics knowledge) as programs, and how math becomes more tractable and interesting when programming is made part of the process.

It’s very thought provoking.

[tags]Mathematics,Programming,Physics,Sussman[/tags]

Addendum: Sussman mentioned this article by Minsky which I found a link to, and will have to read later.

Addendum²: I got the link to the video from this article on Lambda the Ultimate. Lots of other linked videos look interesting to me, I’ll be watching some of them later.