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Mathics: A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica

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Re: Mathics: A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica

#41

Post by dekhn »

CullingTheHerd wrote: post #33
CullingTheHerd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Mathematica is not nearly as effective as math when done by pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician. The value of maths is 1) it's "open-source", 2) it's free to use, 3) if you want to switch from one module to another (say, number theory to category theory) you are able to do so using the same tools (pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician), and so long as the two "modules" are inter-operable it flows…

I should have said: "And yet Mathematica is not nearly as effective as math when done by pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician." I wasn't meaning to imply that Mathematica has no value or has little value. It's indeed awesome both productivity wise and for just enjoying the exercise of doing math. I was trying, and doing a poor job, to give reasons why pencil and paper has value. Not to the exclusion of Mathemat…

I personally do enjoy sometimes doing written math. I manually matrix-multiplied the three axis rotation functions (see the three one-axis rotation functions, and the result of multiplying them) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotation_formalisms_in_three_d...) But of course these days I just let the computer do rotations for me.

I think the interesting product idea here would be something I've never seen: a canvas on a tablet that acts like pencil and paper (drawing) but also "helps" by recognizing what you write, converting it to a formal language, and validating/verifying it. sort of the mathematica notebook, but more like a notepad

Re: Mathics: A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica

#42

Post by oneloop »

sandGorgon wrote: post #9

Genuine question - what is the use of all these versus something like R or Pandas that is actually usable in production as well. What is missing in R/Pandas that makes people choose other pieces of software that does something very similar? Commercial versions of software probably has an edge in support/performance/libraries...Or (as with Simulink ) provides a very specific piece of functionality or integration. But…

Symbolic manipulation. That's the only reason Mathematica is used in academia. If you're in the academia and want to do numeric computations you would use something like R or Matlab.

Re: Mathics: A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica

#44

Post by dekhn »

nikofeyn wrote: post #32
CullingTheHerd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Mathematica is not nearly as effective as math when done by pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician. The value of maths is 1) it's "open-source", 2) it's free to use, 3) if you want to switch from one module to another (say, number theory to category theory) you are able to do so using the same tools (pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician), and so long as the two "modules" are inter-operable it flows…

you are describing a very limited view of what it means to do mathematics. and no, all of mathematics is not open source. much of it is locked behind institutional barriers. also, i don't understand this fervent attitude that something must be free and open source to be useful. a lot of open source software is complete trash. there is a reason why people pay to use tools like matlab, labview, and mathematica. it is b…

i believe the phrase is "software is only free if your time is worthless". There are plenty of counterexamples to this (where there is free software that greatly increases the productivity of the user, without a great deal of time spent moving up the learning curve).

In the case of Mathematica there is a ton that is "locked away behind institution barriers". Mathematica contains millions of lines of code dedicated to implementing clever algorithms for making their root finder and other things work really, really well. but those are all internal source code lines within the company.

I've seen this play out across multiple industries. A good example is SAS and R. There are certain parts of FDA new drug applications that require, specifically, the SAS implementation of a statistical routine, and you can't use R because it doesn't implement the routine in a bit-identical manner. However, a spokesperson from SAS once said, "You'd never fly in an airplane designed by open source software" to which Boeing responded "we use open source software to design our airplanes"

Re: Mathics: A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica

#45

Post by latkin »

The idea of Mathics is great - open-source, in-the-browser Mathematica clone - unfortunately the implementation is still sorely lacking. Last time I tried it (admittedly fairly long ago), even simple stuff just didn't work: https://github.com/mathics/Mathics/issues/260

Re: Mathics: A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica

#46

Post by dave2000 »

nikofeyn wrote: post #32
CullingTheHerd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Mathematica is not nearly as effective as math when done by pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician. The value of maths is 1) it's "open-source", 2) it's free to use, 3) if you want to switch from one module to another (say, number theory to category theory) you are able to do so using the same tools (pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician), and so long as the two "modules" are inter-operable it flows…

you are describing a very limited view of what it means to do mathematics. and no, all of mathematics is not open source. much of it is locked behind institutional barriers. also, i don't understand this fervent attitude that something must be free and open source to be useful. a lot of open source software is complete trash. there is a reason why people pay to use tools like matlab, labview, and mathematica. it is b…

A lot of (free | non-free) software is complete trash.

The advantage of free software is that it never dies; someone can always, if they want/need, pick it up and use/extend it. You don't have to hope a company does go bust, and pay them for the product and/or support, and keep upgrading your devices to newer, still supported versions. Ok, some of that applies to free software but if you want to you could stick with the old versions, or make changes yourself, or pay someone to. These avenues just aren't open with closed source software.

Some people won't be able to afford the commercial products, and the free ones might not be as good/polished but if they get (most of) the job done then they fill a niche.

Re: Mathics: A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica

#47

Post by coldtea »

CullingTheHerd wrote: post #28
dekhn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of Mathematica is pretty straightforward. The language it provides is nothing special, but the scientific and mathematic routines, along with the symbolic support, put it in a class by itself- no open source package I've seen does root finding and other similar processes as effectively. The symbolic stuff is pretty cool too. Years ago I wrote "pyml" which made all the Mathematica features available in Pytho…

And yet Mathematica is not nearly as effective as math when done by pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician. The value of maths is 1) it's "open-source", 2) it's free to use, 3) if you want to switch from one module to another (say, number theory to category theory) you are able to do so using the same tools (pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician), and so long as the two "modules" are inter-operable it flows…

>And yet Mathematica is not nearly as effective as math when done by pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician.

You'd be surprised. Actually it's not even close.

Good like calculating FFT, working with large primes, etc, with pen and power for one...

Re: Mathics: A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica

#48

Post by coldtea »

dave2000 wrote: post #46
nikofeyn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are describing a very limited view of what it means to do mathematics. and no, all of mathematics is not open source. much of it is locked behind institutional barriers. also, i don't understand this fervent attitude that something must be free and open source to be useful. a lot of open source software is complete trash. there is a reason why people pay to use tools like matlab, labview, and mathematica. it is b…

A lot of (free | non-free) software is complete trash. The advantage of free software is that it never dies; someone can always, if they want/need, pick it up and use/extend it. You don't have to hope a company does go bust, and pay them for the product and/or support, and keep upgrading your devices to newer, still supported versions. Ok, some of that applies to free software but if you want to you could stick with…

>The advantage of free software is that it never dies; someone can always, if they want/need, pick it up and use/extend it.

That's a theoretical advantage. In practice lots of things needs to be true for this to happen, even if there's a large user based depending on an abandoned open source program: the code needs to be easily approachable, there should be people willing to extend it who also have the required programming skills etc.

Tons of projects that had lots of users have died or languished.

Heck, even something as popular as GTK+ -- the project is still available, but development has stalled to a halt, and there was a cry of despair from the maintainer that it was just one (one) person doing 90% of the work. If that can happen to GTK+ which is used by millions and powers Gnome, GIMP etc, consider all the other stuff.

Besides, this same theoretical advantage ("never tries") in theory is also potentially true for a proprietary product. Even if the parent company folds, the code and product could always be bought and revived in the future.

Re: Mathics: A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica

#49

Post by reikonomusha »

oneloop wrote: post #43

Mathematica is a very complex piece of software. As an ex-physicist there's no way I would trust this completely unknown open source alternative.

But it's open source, and you can review what you'd like. You're unable to do that with Mathematica.

Re: Mathics: A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica

#50

Post by gaur »

oneloop wrote: post #43

Mathematica is a very complex piece of software. As an ex-physicist there's no way I would trust this completely unknown open source alternative.

You shouldn't trust Mathematica either. It has had bugs in the past [0].

Also it didn't have a proper "undo" feature until a year or so ago, which is pretty embarrassing.

[0] http://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf

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