Years ago, I've been to the beautiful Greek island Kythera. It was a great stay with hiking, swimming, reading… It's one of the islands influenced by centuries of coexistence of different cultures.
Recalling Kythera the Antkythera Mechanism came to my mind. It's an astronomical calculator…that contains many mysteries. Who made it? Is it the only thing of its kind?…there's more here.
How sophisticated it is can be seen through a Lego model.
In ancient Greece, they've made more of this kind of mechanisms, but they have remained unreported…the mechanism does not look like a one's-genius-unique-device. The manufacturing technology looks surprisingly "industrialized"?
What is it that drives
Radical innovation?
Is it the revolution of heroes or the heroes of revolution? A coincidence of talented people at a time or people's motivation to join a revolution and share their best work?
The latter.
Technology revolutions make heroes
Paradigm shifts expose the work of outsiders and original thinkers attracted by the rapid change and growth opportunities. This is true for radical innovations in technology development.
In quant theories, we need to "lift" methodological concerns to more abstraction and modeling and to a meta-level of domain engineering.
How to integrate domain and requirements engineering and software design? How do we achieve abstraction and modeling, handle more general issues of documentation and the required pragmatics?
By programming in a symbolic domain specific language, apply a document centered system design and link technologies that enable the integration of proprietary algorithms… They enable the development of individual complex solutions whilst driving generic technologies.
