You'll love the title of this paper by Chen-Pang Yeang: "Tubes, randomness, and Brownian motions: or, how engineers learned to start worrying about electronic noise"
Einstein 1905 Brownian motion? Maxwell distribution 1859 ("the first-ever statistical law in physics"), Gibbs, Boltzmann. The mental framework for Johnson-Nyquist was already installed. Interesting post.
Any thoughts on how Stephen Wolfram thinks of randomness?
From my understanding, he describes it as phenomena which are simply beyond our "computational boundaries" (reasoning/computing capabilities), and so phenomena appear random to us. The more we can understand patterns, and most importantly predict phenomena, the less we describe as "random".
It is also interesting to note that, under this definition, two actors could view the same phenomena but one would call it random (not able to detect patterns) and the other random (able to detect patterns). I wonder how this generalizes to computational systems.
You'll love the title of this paper by Chen-Pang Yeang: "Tubes, randomness, and Brownian motions: or, how engineers learned to start worrying about electronic noise"
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00407-011-0082-5
I discussed quite a bit of the history in my undergrad course on stochastic systems: https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ece498mr/sp2017/notes/lec15161718.pdf
Einstein 1905 Brownian motion? Maxwell distribution 1859 ("the first-ever statistical law in physics"), Gibbs, Boltzmann. The mental framework for Johnson-Nyquist was already installed. Interesting post.
I'm truly enjoying your "pathological search for the origins of contemporary probabilistic reasoning".
In this context, you may find this book interesting, if you don't already know it:
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674088917
I also really enjoyed this one:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174167/ten-great-ideas-about-chance
Any thoughts on how Stephen Wolfram thinks of randomness?
From my understanding, he describes it as phenomena which are simply beyond our "computational boundaries" (reasoning/computing capabilities), and so phenomena appear random to us. The more we can understand patterns, and most importantly predict phenomena, the less we describe as "random".
It is also interesting to note that, under this definition, two actors could view the same phenomena but one would call it random (not able to detect patterns) and the other random (able to detect patterns). I wonder how this generalizes to computational systems.