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The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

wstein.org

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Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#21

Post by acidflask »

cottonseed wrote: post #10
aerioux wrote: post #4

Question: why would anyone Sage > Magma (even though it's now a company. i.e. since there already is a clear and ahead forerunner?)

Magma is closed-source.

See Slide 4 for why it's important to be open source.

TL;DR: Researcher A finds things he wants improved in Magma (closed source) but can't. Researcher B tries to write improved FOSS implementation, but lost his job, likely in part by spending too much time writing said code and not doing other things like writing papers. Researcher A moves on and has a successful academic career. Moral: writing FOSS can cost you your academic job; it's safer to find something else to do.

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#22

Post by williamstein »

maweki wrote: post #9

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.

You are of course completely right. Almost everybody who works on Sage does so as part of some research mathematics project, often in their spare time, and they just don't have time do the massive amount of work to bring the documentation to the same level of user friendliness as Mathematica. I hope SageMath, Inc. will be able to makes strides to improve documentation for open source math software. Also, this by Greg Bard is a bright spot: http://www.gregorybard.com/Sage.html

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#23

Post by williamstein »

hasch wrote: post #17
chestervonwinch wrote: post #6

What is the difference between running sage math vs ipython / jupyter and importing all the relevant mathematical packages?

almost none, because sagemath more or less switched to use jupyter as its graphical notebook interface. technically, there is a small preparser (for a little bit of syntax sugar on top of python) and some deeper integration of the plotting capabilities.

And hundreds of thousands of lines of new code not available anywhere else written by over 500 mathematicians over the last decade...

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#24

Post by williamstein »

aerioux wrote: post #4

Question: why would anyone Sage > Magma (even though it's now a company. i.e. since there already is a clear and ahead forerunner?)

The programming language of Sage is Python, which is a better overall language than the custom math-only language of Magma. Also, there are over 80K packages for Python on Pypi compared to a handful of packages for Magma. Ecosystems...

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#25

Post by williamstein »

ianai wrote: post #2

Just make sure to add in some DoD specific modules and I think you've got a winner.

DoD is the only organization that is currently providing me with grant funding... (and not much). Microsoft also donated some money to Sage this week! And of course there is Google Summer of Code, which is sponsoring many students to work on Sage this summer.

[Edit: Added Microsoft/Google.]

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#28

Post by phamilton »

William and I both presented at a RethinkDB meetup this last fall (SageMathCloud leverages RethinkDB changefeeds in awesome ways) and I got to talk to him a bit about some of these frustrations. It really is a rough spot to be in and I wish him all the best.

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#29

Post by jasonmorton »

cottonseed wrote: post #10
aerioux wrote: post #4

Question: why would anyone Sage > Magma (even though it's now a company. i.e. since there already is a clear and ahead forerunner?)

Magma is closed-source.

Right - would you rather rely on a theorem which the author claimed is true, but won't let you see the proof, or one where the proof is published and reviewed? That's the choice between closed and open source math software.

Re: The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

#30

Post by et2o »

acidflask wrote: post #8
et2o wrote: post #5

Why did he have to leave academia to start a company if he has tenure?

As Stein explains in the slides: because he couldn't sustainably pay people to work with him on SAGE, and there is only so much you can do alone.

But you can be a professor and also start a company simultaneously
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