Independence in an Age of Conformity: Stephen Wolfram and Stephen Blackwoo‪d‬

"I discovered this amazing thing: you could read a book, and you could learn about something. And that worked really well. Not only could you read books and learn about things, but you could ask questions people maybe hadn’t asked before."

How does one cultivate creativity and independence of mind? Stephen Blackwood talks to physicist and entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram about his precocious and largely self-educated early life and his ascent to become a world-class scientist, an innovator in computational theory, and the founder of a global company. They discuss how to pursue and develop one's gifts, how to think against the grain, and how to approach life with a sense of its unbounded possibility.

Image:  Timothy H. O'Sullivan, Black Cañon, From Camp 8, Looking Above, 1871, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.