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SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

sagemath.org

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Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#21

Post by williamstein »

jimhefferon wrote: post #19
pitiburi wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are waaaay outdated. "SageMathCloud is Now CoCalc" since May 2017. Go google it. And it's not free _at all_, except for very basic stuff. Your pricing depends on what you need, from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Not a criticism, only a heads up for the guys reading the comments.

CoCalc is an open source system. It is convenient to pay for a setup, which is how they hope to get revenue to pay developers.

We also provide a nice easy to install Docker image of Cocalc here: https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc-docker

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#22

Post by noobermin »

When I was in college, about six or so years ago, I used Sage for my physics classes. At some point I stopped using it because it didn't really stand up to Mathematica, which we got for free. My professor said, funnily enough, "sage has been taken over by mathematicians!" talking about how it has a lot of support for math uses but not as much for things like solving ODEs that is more of use for physicists and engineers. It's funny now seeing most of the comments here talking about crypto, which I read about in examples for Sage at the time (finite fields) whilst not knowing what it could be used for other than research.

These days I'm a computational scientist, so I end up using numeric tools anyway (numpy is my life). That said, it'd be great to have access to an open source symbolic tool for the times I need them. How has Sage improved for engineer/science types in the last few years?

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#23

Post by antt »

noobermin wrote: post #22

When I was in college, about six or so years ago, I used Sage for my physics classes. At some point I stopped using it because it didn't really stand up to Mathematica, which we got for free. My professor said, funnily enough, "sage has been taken over by mathematicians!" talking about how it has a lot of support for math uses but not as much for things like solving ODEs that is more of use for physicists and enginee…

If you know what you're doing the axiom bindings make it the most powerful cas in terms of symbolic manipulation.

Mathematica is optimized for giving you results you need in undergrad classes. Sage is not optimized at all, but can solve problems useful to researchers.

It's the difference between osx and linux.

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#24

Post by antt »

pitiburi wrote: post #18
badminton1 wrote: post #15

The initial issue with Sage was its packaging due to its large number of dependencies. That is largely a non-issue now for the end user. Now there is also SageMathCloud, that makes it even more convenient to adopt.

You are waaaay outdated. "SageMathCloud is Now CoCalc" since May 2017. Go google it. And it's not free _at all_, except for very basic stuff. Your pricing depends on what you need, from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Not a criticism, only a heads up for the guys reading the comments.

By very basic stuff you mean "Doing everything a cas can do". The expenses come when you want to connect it to the internet, because people started using the full linux distro you get as a botnet, and increasing performance.

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#25

Post by noobermin »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #14
messe wrote: post #2

Sage is something I keep meaning to learn. Every time I've tried it though, it just didn't feel as polished and integrated as Mathematica.

I am unfortunately forced to use Mathematica because my scientific collaborators do so. While I have become very proficient at it, I don't like the interface or the language very much. Its a functional language put into an interface suitable for iterative programming. Loading external libraries is very non-intuitive, and just being able to separate a single program over many files that you can simultaneously edit is…

I got my PhD in computational plasma physics in a group that heavily used matlab. I'm lucky enough that my advisor was okay with me using numpy and friends instead as long as my plots and figures looked okay. Today, I run a one-man show for my post-doc doing simulations for an experimental group, so I thankfully get to continue this mode of work. And thank god I didn't have to face losing the ability to run my scripts after leaving the university (this happened to a couple of fellow graduates I know!) and today, when I want to run something on the supercomputer, I just run it; I don't have to worry about how many licenses are still on the license server or whatever the fuck. I get how Matlab is a thing and people like it, but potentially having analysis delayed because of lack of licenses seems somewhere between primitive and barbaric in 2018.

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#26

Post by ChrisLomont »

antt wrote: post #23
noobermin wrote: post #22

When I was in college, about six or so years ago, I used Sage for my physics classes. At some point I stopped using it because it didn't really stand up to Mathematica, which we got for free. My professor said, funnily enough, "sage has been taken over by mathematicians!" talking about how it has a lot of support for math uses but not as much for things like solving ODEs that is more of use for physicists and enginee…

If you know what you're doing the axiom bindings make it the most powerful cas in terms of symbolic manipulation. Mathematica is optimized for giving you results you need in undergrad classes. Sage is not optimized at all, but can solve problems useful to researchers. It's the difference between osx and linux.

>Mathematica is optimized for giving you results you need in undergrad classes

What makes you think this? Mathematica is used in all sorts research projects, technical fields, finance, and so on. I've seen Mathematica required or recommended in many, many job listings, especially for quants. I've never seen Sage there.

For evidence, here [1] is what you get for searching for Mathematica on Indeed.com. Note pretty much every one of those jobs lists several math related packages. Not one mentions Sage.

Unfortunately you cannot run the same search on Sage, since there is an ERP package that shows up instead. However, from browsing those listing again I find zero hits for the math package Sage.

[1] https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Mathematica&l=

[1] https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Mathematica&l=

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#27

Post by noobermin »

ur-whale wrote: post #17
messe wrote: post #2

Sage is something I keep meaning to learn. Every time I've tried it though, it just didn't feel as polished and integrated as Mathematica.

Mathematica has lots of drawbacks, chief among which : if you write Mathematica code, you're building on top of an expensive, closed-source bunch of opaque algorithm that are neither guaranteed to be correct (can't see what they do) nor to continue behaving the way they did when you wrote your code (you're at the mercy of Wolfram changing what the code does). As far as I'm concerned, this essentially precludes doing…

You can say that, but I know lot of scientists and mathematicians who extensively use Mathematica in their research.

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#29

Post by noobermin »

williamstein wrote: post #28

Hi - I am the guy who started Sage. If you have any questions I can try to answer them here.

I made this comment below, but about 6 or so years ago, I found it could be used for science and engineering purposes like solving ODEs but it seemed a little bit rough at that. Today, is it improved for use for science types? Do Sage and Cocalc find users in this area?

Re: SageMath – Open-Source Mathematical Software System

#30

Post by lvh »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #26
antt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know what you're doing the axiom bindings make it the most powerful cas in terms of symbolic manipulation. Mathematica is optimized for giving you results you need in undergrad classes. Sage is not optimized at all, but can solve problems useful to researchers. It's the difference between osx and linux.

>Mathematica is optimized for giving you results you need in undergrad classes What makes you think this? Mathematica is used in all sorts research projects, technical fields, finance, and so on. I've seen Mathematica required or recommended in many, many job listings, especially for quants. I've never seen Sage there. For evidence, here [1] is what you get for searching for Mathematica on Indeed.com. Note pretty muc…

Despite being the Sage fanboy in the thread, I have to admit that all the use I've seen of Sage has been academic or experimental; I haven't heard of anyone using Sage for statistics in any context, and not for quants or actuarial science or anything of the sort.

I'd suggest that Sage is likely less good for those uses since Sage is good at the kinds of things you're likely to find academics use Sage for (e.g. tons of discrete math and most things cryptography). Secondly, since there's very little pressure for high-end uses of commercial packages to worry about the licensing cost of a mathematics package like JMP or Mathematica.

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