Hope everyone in the U.S. had a good and safe Memorial Day weekend. I spent mine mostly on the soccer pitch both as an assessor mentoring young referees and as a working referee. Then there was some yardwork and some reading. It's interesting how things seem to coalesce around a theme. (or meme in the digital era).
I picked up Stephan Wolfram's book A New Kind of Science a few years ago and waded through it. Sort of understood it--sort of not. Then based on a podcast interview, I picked up Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio. Meanwhile, WolframAlpha is unveiled upon an unsuspecting Web community. I listen to the high tech podcast panels debating whether it's just another Google, or what. Another podcast interview with Wolfram and Leo Laport at the end of a This Week In Tech podcast revealed that Wolfram isn't trying to do a search--he's trying to computationalize all the information on the Web. In other words, you should be able to discover things and the results of combinations of things through propositional calculus.
If I left you behind on that one, read a complimentary book to Livio's. While his book takes an interesting look at the development of some mathematical theories, David Berlinski's The Advent of the Algorithm takes you on an entirely different path. While Livio's work traces through Newton and calculus, Berlinski looks at Leibnitz's calculus, but spends more time on his computational system. This evolution (though I hate to use the word since Berlinski is a skeptic of Darwinism, as with almost everything else) of thought leads through the mathematical logicians such as Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead and will--when I finish the book--take us through the develpment of algorithms as the basis of computer programming. The book requires some thought while wading through it--but it's not impossible. I remember running across "well formed formulas" and other concepts and symbols of this line of thought when I was young, probably early high school. It was interesting, but the only use at the time I could figure out was that it was supposed to increase your IQ. Didn't work for me ;-)
So, in really coarse words, what is going on with Wolfram's attempt to apply computational propositional analysis to the Web. This is the undertaking of a certified genius--which Wolfram is.
I have really shortened this discussion. It is so complex as to require a longer piece, if not a book. But I, for one, find it fascinating.
2:38:31 PM 
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