51–60 of 97 posts
I have tried Mathematica for small duration and in general was wowed by it. For free CAS I would recommend to give Axiom or FriCAS(more actively developed) a run. http://fricas.sourceforge.net/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_(computer_algebra_system...
Mathematica is an amazing tool, but it has one huge downside: reproducibility. It is a closed monolith, and - especially when you start to use advanced features - you derive results from it that can't be independently verified because of the closed source nature of the monolith.
I still do not understand what I'm doing half the time. Mostly just googling and stackoverflow answers get me by. For example, I don't understand why I can't use subscripts as symbols?
Any recommendations on trying to 'get' mathematica?
Mathematica is an amazing tool, but it has one huge downside: reproducibility. It is a closed monolith, and - especially when you start to use advanced features - you derive results from it that can't be independently verified because of the closed source nature of the monolith.
Has this ever happened to you? There can't be many areas of mathematics in which it could.
First, there is a question of theoretical vs. practical reproducibility: true, in _theory_, an open-source codebase with many millions of lines of code of highly complex transformation can be checked for accuracy by anyone. In _practice_, only very few insiders will have both technical understanding and time to verify the correctness of this or that algorithm, and everyone else would need to rely on their expertise. That situation is no different from using a proprietary system if we trust their authors.
Second, while it might be shocking for someone, most of the science, outside of maybe math, it's not _practically_ reproducible. Most of the articles are behind paywalls, don't have enough data to replicate their results (even economists much more often than not won't include their raw data or algorithms or both). Also, no one who is trying to build a scientific career would try to replicate someone else's results, especially if it requires some costly equipment, reagents, etc. - the rewards in the scientific community are for novel results. Replication crisis[1] describes this pretty well.
Most of the software that runs LHC at CERN is probably not inspectable by a regular Joe the physicist, yet somehow the physicist community somehow trusts their results, etc.
In summary, while an open-source software of Mathematica quality would be awesome in theory, I highly doubt it would be practical for a long time.
I'm a physicist and I've used mathematica sparingly off and on for several years, mostly manipulating symbolic formulas. I still do not understand what I'm doing half the time. Mostly just googling and stackoverflow answers get me by. For example, I don't understand why I can't use subscripts as symbols? Any recommendations on trying to 'get' mathematica?
A scanned PDF was made available for free with the permission of the publisher: https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/16485/are-yo...
Many people on this and similar threads rightly question whether results received with the help of a closed source software are reproducible. I think it's a fair question, but these discussions often miss a couple of important points. First, there is a question of theoretical vs. practical reproducibility: true, in _theory_, an open-source codebase with many millions of lines of code of highly complex transformation…
Your (and Wolfram’s!) argument about “not needing to see the insides because really only 10 people in the world understand it anyway” should really be an argument for opening it up. If 10 people could understand it, and we must intersect that group with folks who can access the source, we are left in quite a dismal state of affairs.
If a software is used to create data that is okay like editing text files in microsoft windows. But computational software such as Wolfram being closed source bothers me a lot. There is no way to verify the science you do is correct.
Quite often it gives you a result that you can then prove directly, or check with other tools. The benefit of MMA is that it has a lot of tools and a good interface, good documentation, and a large community. In practice, pretty much no one doing science has the expertise or time to completely verify the science they are doing - they are building on centuries of knowledge across many disciplines, and for the most par…
I mean is it worth using the machine learning from Mathematica or Tensorflow is better?
Is it better to use integer optimization solvers or then Mathematica?
In which ways you are using Mathematica and Really leveraging it?
Sorry for my question but I think and suspect I am missing something bigger.
Will be glad if someone Illuminate me. And please be free to PM if your project is discreet.
Many people on this and similar threads rightly question whether results received with the help of a closed source software are reproducible. I think it's a fair question, but these discussions often miss a couple of important points. First, there is a question of theoretical vs. practical reproducibility: true, in _theory_, an open-source codebase with many millions of lines of code of highly complex transformation…
Reproducible has a much simpler meaning than that you describe: it’s feasible for any scientist to recreate the result perpetually. While inspection of the methods might help one understand the result—and I think itself holds a great deal of value to especially mathematicians—just the simple ability to compute the answers yourself without binding yourself to a contract or paying $1000’s of dollars in license fees is…
Here is a recent example: Imperial College COVID-19 response team published an article[1] where they modeled different effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as suppression and mitigation on the number of infected, deaths, etc. This is a very interesting result, but it's impossible to replicate their results in practice without contacting the authors, as their methodology is not enough to reproduce it.
While someone else[2] posted their own model that is very well documented and fully reproducible by anyone with a $230/year personal license.
While theoretically [1] is high science and [2] is not, in my own opinion [2] is better than [1]. I would love more science to be done and discussed that way. Ideally, using open-source software, but in practice, using Wolfram Language, in that case, is already good enough in my opinion.
PS. I'm not affiliated with Wolfram Research in any way.
[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...