11–20 of 202 posts
Why did he have to leave academia to start a company if he has tenure?
He's looking for ways to make safe and open source software dominate. And there needs to be a lot of growth for that to happen.
The problem with Sage, while it's an amazing piece of software, that it is abysmally documented. As is maxima. Sure, there's an example on how to do integration and anything on a high-school level but every time I wanted to do something a little bit more complex, I was completely lost. I found the Mathematica documentation to be miles ahead.
What is the difference between running sage math vs ipython / jupyter and importing all the relevant mathematical packages?
What is the difference between running sage math vs ipython / jupyter and importing all the relevant mathematical packages?
There's a lot more stuff in sage, like good support for graph theory and group theory, which iPython doesn't even touch. It also wraps a number of other pieces of excellent open source projects.
He (and his group) developed CHOLMOD and UMFPACK and other sparse solvers used everywhere. Basically, when you type A/b in Matlab, it calls his code.
It was an incredibly challenging task going from sort-of/kind-of being able to solve linear systems to where we are today. Hardly anybody thinks about it. Again, you just type A/b, even when A is poorly conditioned. You can write a crappy solver in less than 100 lines of code, but if you read his papers, building a rock-solid solver was a very difficult task.
Unfortunately this kind of work is important, but pretty thankless.
For other people confused about the meaning of BP in this context, it means Benjamin Pierce Fellow. It appears this talk was given in the context of the Benjamin Pierce Centennial Conference: http://www.math.harvard.edu/conferences/bp/
What is the difference between running sage math vs ipython / jupyter and importing all the relevant mathematical packages?
For other people confused about the meaning of BP in this context, it means Benjamin Pierce Fellow. It appears this talk was given in the context of the Benjamin Pierce Centennial Conference: http://www.math.harvard.edu/conferences/bp/
Yes, exactly. And I haven't given the talk yet! I'm giving it 2 hours from right now, and I'm pretty nervous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot more stuff in sage, like good support for graph theory and group theory, which iPython doesn't even touch. It also wraps a number of other pieces of excellent open source projects.
I see. I've always thought of sage as ipython+sympy+numpy+matplotlib+scipy ... sort of an enthought type of deal.
For other people confused about the meaning of BP in this context, it means Benjamin Pierce Fellow. It appears this talk was given in the context of the Benjamin Pierce Centennial Conference: http://www.math.harvard.edu/conferences/bp/
Yes, exactly. And I haven't given the talk yet! I'm giving it 2 hours from right now, and I'm pretty nervous.