The story of our current best understanding of physical reality is a fascinating human tale. Over many centuries, intuitive physics and philosophical theories were subjected to the crucible of the scientific method, and the mathematical models and tools that survived are both eerily beautiful and unreasonably effective at predicting the evolution of the physical world.

Unfortunately, understanding this story and its mathematical models typically requires years of mathematical training, and a special type of brain that’s able to process dense abstraction with very few visual clues. This is a tragedy, as understanding these physical models at a deep level is a prerequisite to many of the solutions for the huge issues our world is facing.

This talk will present SICMUtils, a Clojure system designed as a workshop for conducting serious work in mathematical physics and sharing those explorations in a deeply interactive, multiplayer way. The library is built as a “literate program” in a layered style that recapitulates the story of modern physics; a major goal is to rebuild a modern scientific computing stack out primitives as elegant and understandable as the models they implement.

Sam is a researcher at the Mentat Collective, currently working on a series of interactive, multiplayer computational textbooks for exploring mathematical physics and other forms of modeled reality. He has worked as an engineer at (Google) X, Stripe, Twitter, and founded Paddleguru and Racehub. Sam is most well known in the software world as the author of Summingbird, Algebird, and SICMUtils, and as the maintainer of Cascalog. He has a secret identity as a mountain athlete and amateur aircraft mechanic, and lives with wife Jenna and daughter Juno in Boulder, Colorado.