SageMath: Python-based Mathematics. Rock it. • Hacker News Board

Re: SageMath: Python-based Mathematics. Rock it.

#21

Post by tomrod » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 12:41 AM UTC

cgrubb wrote: post #13

katovatzschyn wrote: post #6

I've checked back on this project from time to time but I've never been satisfied with it. The last I used it was perhaps 2 years ago, returning to MATLAB, Mathematica and Haskell/C. Would any who uses it now or recently care to make a candid comparison between it and its commercial competitors?

The math software I use is Mathematica (Home Ed), Sage, Octave, R, and TeXShop. All open source except for Mathematica. Mathematica has a few advantages. The input notation can look more like traditional mathematics: adjacency instead of * for multiplication, superscript instead of ^ for exponentiation, fraction notation. I think that cuts down on errors. Variables are symbolic in Mathematica by default. The Mathemat…

R is sweet. Octave has its ups and downs--I'm thinking Numpy/SciPy/Matlibplot may be a better route for my own personal computing (still learning though)--especially since Python has bindings practically for everything.

I agree that Sage still needs work (the 100+ bugs submitted daily to the RSS support feed says so!) but it works really well.

Re: SageMath: Python-based Mathematics. Rock it.

#22

Post by cgrubb » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 12:59 AM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #21

cgrubb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The math software I use is Mathematica (Home Ed), Sage, Octave, R, and TeXShop. All open source except for Mathematica. Mathematica has a few advantages. The input notation can look more like traditional mathematics: adjacency instead of * for multiplication, superscript instead of ^ for exponentiation, fraction notation. I think that cuts down on errors. Variables are symbolic in Mathematica by default. The Mathemat…

R is sweet. Octave has its ups and downs--I'm thinking Numpy/SciPy/Matlibplot may be a better route for my own personal computing (still learning though)--especially since Python has bindings practically for everything. I agree that Sage still needs work (the 100+ bugs submitted daily to the RSS support feed says so!) but it works really well.

Octave is free and I used MATLAB in school so it made sense to install it. I've never had problems with Octave though I've heard others complain about it. I don't use it that much. For graphics I always use R.

Maybe I should have mentioned Coq in my previous list. I installed it a few days ago. Haven't learned to use it yet.

Re: SageMath: Python-based Mathematics. Rock it.

#23

Post by moondowner » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 2:15 AM UTC

One thing Sage needs to do is to make installation easier. Make a PPA for Ubuntu, a repo for RPM packages, and setups for Windows and OS X.

Then people will start talking more about Sage. It's a great package, but the road to getting it is bumpy.

For those who don't know what Sage is, think of it as an Open Source alternative to Wolfram Mathematica.

I also see comments about R. For me, the best way to code in R is to use RKWard. It's maybe the best frontend for R. Feel free to check it out..

Re: SageMath: Python-based Mathematics. Rock it.

#24

Post by jamii » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 3:12 AM UTC

muuh-gnu wrote: post #7

msarnoff wrote: post #5

Maxima ( http://maxima.sourceforge.net/ ), one of the packages used by Sage, is a quite capable computer algebra system (written in Lisp) with a very long history. It's descended from Macsyma, which was created at MIT in the 1960s. If you look through some of the Maxima source files you'll find modification dates from the '70s. That has to make it one of the oldest still-active software projects. Heck, it's older tha…

The relationship of Sage with existing open source projects was something I never quite understood. Instead of investing their knowledge and time into improving the capabilities of existing systems (SciPy, NumPy or Maxima, Octave) to bring them up to par with the more pervasive commercial offerings (Matlab, Mathematica, Maple), they basically just bolted Python onto everything without in the end improving anything. S…

The idea is to allow access to lots of different proven, well-tested systems using a single consistent syntax and environment.

Re: SageMath: Python-based Mathematics. Rock it.

#25

Post by tomrod » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 4:09 AM UTC

moondowner wrote: post #23

One thing Sage needs to do is to make installation easier. Make a PPA for Ubuntu, a repo for RPM packages, and setups for Windows and OS X. Then people will start talking more about Sage. It's a great package, but the road to getting it is bumpy. For those who don't know what Sage is, think of it as an Open Source alternative to Wolfram Mathematica. I also see comments about R. For me, the best way to code in R is to…

Sage install for Ubuntu is very straightforward--they even provide the command to unpack. If you've programmed in Python, or even better Fortran or C, the installation is mostly trivial.

Nontrivial is compiling from source, however :-).

Sage does more than Mathematica, as I understand it. It can be used as a replacement for Matlab, R, etc. I got informed of it by friend who is an applied mathematician by day and a .Net guru by night. Wikipedia has a decent writeup at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagemath

Re: SageMath: Python-based Mathematics. Rock it.

#26

Post by tomrod » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 5:04 AM UTC

cgrubb wrote: post #22

tomrod wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

R is sweet. Octave has its ups and downs--I'm thinking Numpy/SciPy/Matlibplot may be a better route for my own personal computing (still learning though)--especially since Python has bindings practically for everything. I agree that Sage still needs work (the 100+ bugs submitted daily to the RSS support feed says so!) but it works really well.

Octave is free and I used MATLAB in school so it made sense to install it. I've never had problems with Octave though I've heard others complain about it. I don't use it that much. For graphics I always use R. Maybe I should have mentioned Coq in my previous list. I installed it a few days ago. Haven't learned to use it yet.

Octave does not have a pre-packaged optimization routine or a usable toolbox of which I am aware, and I find GnuPlot abysmal (but this is likely due to my lack of experience with it).

These are probably easily corrected. But solutions already exist within the FLOSS community with other packages such as Sage (and, of course, Numpy and the rest)--reinventing the wheel is something few have time for! :-) This is a big reason I like Sage: it is designed like the Borg in that it uses bindings to connect into other software (both proprietary and open source).

Yes! Star Trek reference and SageMath in the same sentence. It is a good night.

Re: SageMath: Python-based Mathematics. Rock it.

#27

Post by Pickhardt » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 6:37 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #9

This might sound a bit silly, but I still have never found something that let me work with problems quite as easily as my TI-89/92. Most of the CAS systems I've used feel like coding, while the TI CAS system feels like doing math. Sage just feels like an extension to the Math direction when all I really want is a fast (color) desktop version of my TI-92. The closest I've seen was the old graphing calc that came with…

Here's one I made that I think you'll like: encalc.com

It does computer algebra, like integrate(x^2), as well as physical constants, like coulombs or hbar. I made a draggable graphing calculator for it, but it was too slow so I never released it.

Re: SageMath: Python-based Mathematics. Rock it.

#28

Post by tzs » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 7:46 AM UTC

igravious wrote: post #12

I am writing my master thesis on free & open source mathematical tools. To my shame I have never heard of SageMath, it never came up on my radar. I had heard of Numpy, scipy, matplotlib, maxima, Octave and others. I know that custom software is written in Fortran and C/C++- Why had I not heard of SageMath? Are there any other large open source mathematical projects that may have escaped my notice? Please enlighten me…

> The aim of my thesis is to discover why proprietary tools like Maple, Mathlab, and Mathematica have flourished within the mathematics world given that theorem proving and calculating seem to require access to the algorithms for verification processes.

We don't have access to the algorithms that a human mathematician working unaided uses to do things like evaluate a tricky integral, simplify a complicated expression, and so on, yet we can still verify their proofs.

I don't see why him using a computer program, proprietary or not, would make a difference. We verify the proof by checking the result, not the thought processes or computational processes that were used behind the scenes to come up with it.

Re: SageMath: Python-based Mathematics. Rock it.

#29

Post by kcrisman » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 2:38 PM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #25

moondowner wrote: post #23

One thing Sage needs to do is to make installation easier. Make a PPA for Ubuntu, a repo for RPM packages, and setups for Windows and OS X. Then people will start talking more about Sage. It's a great package, but the road to getting it is bumpy. For those who don't know what Sage is, think of it as an Open Source alternative to Wolfram Mathematica. I also see comments about R. For me, the best way to code in R is to…

Sage install for Ubuntu is very straightforward--they even provide the command to unpack. If you've programmed in Python, or even better Fortran or C, the installation is mostly trivial. Nontrivial is compiling from source, however :-). Sage does more than Mathematica, as I understand it. It can be used as a replacement for Matlab, R, etc. I got informed of it by friend who is an applied mathematician by day and a .N…

Compiling from source should be just downloading source, unpacking, and typing `make`, at least on most popular Linux distros and OS X.

Re: SageMath: Python-based Mathematics. Rock it.

#30

Post by kcrisman » Tue, Jan 11, 2011, 2:39 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #9

This might sound a bit silly, but I still have never found something that let me work with problems quite as easily as my TI-89/92. Most of the CAS systems I've used feel like coding, while the TI CAS system feels like doing math. Sage just feels like an extension to the Math direction when all I really want is a fast (color) desktop version of my TI-92. The closest I've seen was the old graphing calc that came with…

By the way, Macs since OS X 10.4 come with a very nice (numerical) Grapher program, which is in Utilities.