Stephen Wolfram recounts the entire history of mathematics in 90 minutes

Stephen Wolfram's podcast features a 90-minute lecture that he delivered at the 2019 Wolfram Summer School (MP3), recapitulating the history of mathematics from prehistory to the present day.

This is a fascinating lecture, and it also epitomizes Wolfram in that it is a magnificent feat that would have benefited immensely from editorial reflection. Wolfram announces that's he's giving the lecture off the top of his head, and as far as that goes, it's incredibly impressive. And yet...it makes you wonder, if he had actually prepared a detailed crib or even written the speech out, how much more fluid would it have been? Would the transitions be smoother? Would he spend less time fumbling for names or dates, or backtracking?

It's basically a spoken-word illustration of the problems with his incredible (and incredibly difficult) book A New Kind of Science which was literally too large to read without a special stand, and which was both brilliant and rambling and unstructured, and would have benefited immensely from a hard edit.

(Thanks, Swede!)