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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]

#51

Post by dharmon »

math_and_stuff wrote: post #35
dharmon wrote: post #15

This story reminds me of Prof. Tim Davis of Texas A&M, formerly Florida, who I heard had a hard time getting tenure, after making the software and mathematical world a much better place. 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 solv…

Duff (who was Davis's post-doc advisor IIRC) also deserves credit for MA57, which is used in MATLAB's sparse symmetric indefinite solvers [1]. And the giant BLAS and LAPACK crew (as well as the previous LINPACK authors) deserve some credit for dense systems. [1] http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/ldl.html?requestedD...

You're right, of course, and the two little words "his group" don't do justice to the army of PhD, masters, and undergraduate students who spent their time on this massive codebase.

But in this case, and in the context of the OP, it was Davis's oversight and possibly tangible sacrifices (I don't know the details of his career) that made it possible.

Each time we use some numerical methods and it Just Works, we should mumble a tiny prayer of thanks to folks like these, and the writers of BLAS, LAPACK, ARPACK, and many others that provide the backbone of an incredible amount of work.

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

#53

Post by williamstein »

dorfsmay wrote: post #48
williamstein wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely YES. Sage is and will always be 100% open source. To ensure this, the GPL copyright is spread amongst over 500 people. Also, the software written by the company SageMath, Inc. is also completely open source ( https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc ).

This is great! What will be the source of revenue? Dual-license? Support?

It's explained here. Sage itself is 100% open source, but we have a cloud hosted environment people can pay (a very reasonable amount) to use. https://cloud.sagemath.com/policies/pricing.html

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

#55

Post by wbl »

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?)

I currently use Magma in my research. I have run into a crash bug I cannot fix or debug, holding up an element of my thesis work. A lot of effort has gone into working around Magma limitations, which Sage doesn't have because it is sanely designed. If you've never had to use Magma, consider yourself lucky.

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

#56

Post by ianai »

williamstein wrote: post #25
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.]

I'm not familiar enough, but is there any path for you make it more marketable with things like: -some sort of iOS/android app -somehow tying in computing modularization? I'm thinking like tensorflow or other such things -picking off modeling tasks as use-cases. I get this from my step dad whose lab work has been in modeling..well, this: http://esd1.lbl.gov/research/projects/ascem/

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

#58

Post by ddumas »

I'm glad William included slide 10 calling attention to the hostile and insulting attitude Wolfram Research has toward mathematicians and reproducible science in general. (I think some of Sage Math Inc's other closed-course competitors likely have similar attitudes, but Wolfram Research seems to be the worst.)

"You should realize at the outset that while knowing about the internals of Mathematica may be of intellectual interest, it is usually much less important in practice than you might at first suppose. Indeed, in almost all practical uses of Mathematica, issues about how Mathematica works inside turn out to be largely irrelevant. Particularly in more advanced applications of Mathematica, it may sometimes seem worthwhile to try to analyze internal algorithms in order to predict which way of doing a given computation will be the most efficient. But most often the analyses will not be worthwhile. For the internals of Mathematica are quite complicated."

Reference: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/WhyYouDoNotUs...

For comparison, if you want to audit the Sage Math algorithms that your research depends upon, all you need to do is fire up a text editor (or browse their github). And you won't find any statement in the Sage Math docs telling you not to bother because you're too dumb to understand what you're reading anyway.

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

#59

Post by banach »

williamstein wrote: post #16
hypeibole wrote: post #3

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.

As a an academic contributor to a mathematical software project (much less mature than Sage), I want to thank you for giving this talk. Hope it starts a much-needed public discussion about this topic.

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

#60

Post by raverbashing »

cs702 wrote: post #57

It's SHAMEFUL that academics like Stein who dedicate their lives to developing amazing open-source software do not get funding and frequently fail to get tenure. These individuals truly are making the world better!

See the before-the-last slide

Academia values mindless papers over actual results.

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