Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wstein.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 202 posts

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

#71

Post by x0x0 »

dharmon wrote: post #51
math_and_stuff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I heard (and hope it's true!) Prof Davis got a well-deserved license fee from MathWorks...

Prof Doug Lea at Oswego is another unsung hero who has done a ton for programming and particularly parallel programming. A big chunk of java's std library is copyright Josh Bloch and Doug Lea. In particular, Prof Lea built jsr166.

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

#72

Post by mungoid »

This is why I love sagemath, and open source in general. I cloned the repo a few weeks ago after hearing him mention how he is mainly the sole developer. It's a huge undertaking and i know how draining something like that can be for motivation.

I may not have time to do a lot but i am gonna join in and help as much as possible. Documentation, bug fixes, whatever. This project deserves it imo

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

#73

Post by TJSomething »

I like the idea of SageMathCloud. I had a numerical methods class that I took where we used a web-based Python math environment that the professor was having his grad students build. It was pretty buggy and would go down sometimes.

Last I heard, they switched back to MATLAB. Having taught MATLAB, I wouldn't wish that on anyone. But if SageMathCloud had been around, it would have been a good option.

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

#74

Post by Cyph0n »

williamstein wrote: post #46
et2o wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have tried for a while now, and I thought I could do both. But... (1) It is difficult on a personal level--for example last month SageMathCloud got hit by a major DDOS attack 15 minutes before I had to teach a class. I have family and though I love to work, there are only so many hours in a day. (2) There I am at a big old state university, and there are many complicated byzantine conflict of interest and IP rules,…

Why not take a leave of absence to at least get the company started and acquire some funding? After that, you could just have a consulting role with the company.

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

#76

Post by ianai »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #49
williamstein wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Setting up a company can help because it will let other researchers support the project by buying the software on research grants." This is absolutely correct, and has happened many times now in the last few months (I started the company itself a year ago).

By the way, another way to get financial support for an open source project is to sell a short tutorial book. For example, the creator of Laravel did this on Leanpub (disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Leanpub) and did pretty well: https://leanpub.com/laravel is #7 in lifetime earnings on Leanpub. (Also, one of the core contributors on Laravel has done even better: https://leanpub.com/codebright is #2 in lifetime earnin…

Even more if you can tie it in with enough topics for a textbook.

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

#77

Post by matt4077 »

catnaroek wrote: post #7
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/

Peirce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Peirce . Not to be confused with Pierce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_C._Pierce .

Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin_Pierce, my other childhood role model. No, I wasn't too popular :)

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

#79

Post by selimthegrim »

x0x0 wrote: post #71
dharmon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I heard (and hope it's true!) Prof Davis got a well-deserved license fee from MathWorks... Prof Doug Lea at Oswego is another unsung hero who has done a ton for programming and particularly parallel programming. A big chunk of java's std library is copyright Josh Bloch and Doug Lea. In particular, Prof Lea built jsr166.

Didn't he write a book or two on Java parallelism?

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

#80

Post by sold »

davesque wrote: post #63

Slightly off-topic: Does anyone know if Sage allows for lisp-style meta-programming like Mathematica?

It's Python - you can do a lot of meta-programming with it, though unlike Lisp and Mathematica there's a division between expressions and statements.
Post reply on HN