Richard Fateman's queasiness regarding Sage

Richard Fateman:
> Lots of separate points I'd like to make, here.
> * Will Sage fail or not? [...]

Sage will not fail.

> * My expectation is that people who want to access Maxima
> should use Maxima through an interface that supports
>  ALL components of Maxima.

One can use all the functionality of Maxima with Sage.

>  Attaching pieces of code via pseudo-ttys
> in Python does not sound like a robust engineering technique.
> * If you or WS thinks that porting Maxima to ECL improves Maxima in any
> substantive way,

It will address robustness issues with pseudo-ttys.

> you are entitled to your opinion, but to the extent that
> people knowledgeable about Maxima are diverted to debugging
> yet another lisp implementation, it is a distraction from forward
> progress in Maxima, at least in my opinion.

How many people contributed to the Maxima codebase
in the last month?

> What William Stein may be saying (or rather not saying) is that yes, there
> are all these other programs that you can download free and run as
> alternatives to the named programs, but we won't mention them since they
> are, in terms of our philosophy not VIABLE!

I mention those other systems regularly, and list them here:
                       http://sagemath.org/components.html

> Eh? By the SAGE DEFINITION a system is NOT VIABLE if you cannot compile all
> the components from scratch on your computer with free software. Even if you
> can do it, the system STILL MAY NOT BE VIABLE if there is someone else who
> can't compile it from scratch on one of HIS computers.

The definition of "viable" varies hugely from person to person, so I
listen to a wide
range of users and potential users about what they need.

> It seems that this definition of viability,  not power, usefulness,
> generality, or even free, open-source, etc, is one (if not the principal)
> key to the justification for Sage.

That is ludicrous.

> VIABILITY apparently is the reason that
> (say) Maxima and Axiom and Xcas are not acceptable alternatives to
> Mathematica or Maple, but Sage is.

Sage is not an acceptable alternative to Mathematica ane Maple (yet).

> * Instead of finding a remedy to some bug in Maxima or Axiom, or add
> features that provide value beyond that available in Maple or Mathematica,
> or Magma or Matlab, staff will be devoted to fulfilling an essentially
> political statement about free speech.

Instead of working on Maxima or Axiom, "my staff" would
be doing data entry, menial systems administration work,
grading papers, etc.; this would be what they would be doing if
I hadn't done the legwork to get them funded to work on Sage
this summer.

> ...
> Anyway this fast algebra stuff is (probably) not based on some wobbly
> political consideration.

> Am I reading the mission statement wrong?

Yes.

>  It might be that Sage is targeted particularly to those people who
> require 2 or more of Mathematica, Matlab,
> Maple, Magma, and that therefore no SINGLE existing solution except for
> texmacs that comes immediately to mind.   I don't think so.

Texmacs is definitely not a solution for using multiple systems together;
it is an amazing system for typesetting mathematics and recording typeset
versions of interactive sessions, but that is all.

My personal research in the last week has involved all of the following
in related computations:

    * data acquisition -- gather data from the stock market (via
Python's urllib),
    * statistics -- statistical analysis of data, e.g., computing
correlation matrices and
                         distributions (using scipy, numpy and R)
    * number theory -- computing arithmetic invariants of elliptic
curves; computing
                         with Heegner points of and L-functions.
    * visualization -- drawing 2d and 3d graphics; drawing fractals
    * symbolic calculus -- symbolic integration to find a cumulative
distribution function
    * numerical computation -- some root finding and optimization
    * notebook interface / interact -- for interactively working with
all of the above graphically

No single existing solution that you've listed would come close to addressing
all of the above.

> But let us look at some new stuff.  One of the Sage employees is funded by
> Google/NSF to do "symbolic Calculus".
> Now I do not know the person (Gary Furnish) nor the problems being addressed
> specifically, but I found in http://sagemath.blogspot.com/ that the goal for
> this project is [...] Is this research or just fiddling?

It doesn't matter, because when the summer is over Gary -- who is an
undergrad -- will
have learned a lot from his experience working on Sage.

> Another employee is funded to work on plotting.  All I can say is,  Again?

That "employee" is Elliott Brossard who is currently a high school student, and
who would really like to get involved with something related to research soon,
instead of just being a face in the crowd when he starts as a freshman
next Fall.
Are you honestly criticizing a high school student for working on Sage because
he is doing something that is not pushing forward the frontiers of research
is computer algebra?

> * Now tom boothby at u.washington.edu thinks Sage is here to stay (only time
> will tell), and that I am trying to turn the Maxima community against Sage.
> No, I am concerned that people will be spending their time and energy, not
> at the edges of what is known, but duplicating, re-programming, and
> debugging the well-known central constructive parts of computer algebra,
> graphical user interfaces, plotting, etc.  While there may occasionally be
> technical advantages to taking a fresh look at these pieces, the driving
> forces in Sage do not seem to be primarily technical or scientific, but
> philosophical and political.

The driving forces in Sage are primarily technical and scientific.

> Some time ago I tried KDE or some such system that booted and ran entirely
> from a CD. That allowed me to run some scientific software without having to
> mess up my disk (filled with Windows), but I think that for Sage, it fails
> to be viable.

It sounds like you used that system once or twice and never used
it again.  Think about why.  I rest my case.

> * Now it could be that "the world" does not need more technical advances in
> CAS, and that what it really needs is whizzy plotting and a charismatic
> eccentric spokesman. ooh, Stephen Wolfram did that, and made it into a
> business. Or it could be that what it needs is,um, some <describe Sage here,
> python OO GUI internet software engineering> thingee. Maybe.

I can't speak for the world, but I personally need both
technical advances in CAS and I needs whizzy plotting.

> Conclusion:
> I think that people with the skill set for advancing computer algebra
> systems and scientific computing generally are unusual, and that (after an
> educational process that may involve courses, reading, programming), such
> people should be encouraged to advance the state of the art, not duplicate it.

I think that every single person reading this email should do something
to improve the available tools for mathematical software, and
I *strongly* encourage them to do so in whatever way they best can,
be that taking a fresh view on something already done (e.g., symbolic
integration, plotting, etc.), advancing the state of the art, carefully
reporting bugs, or starting a company (like Wolfram did).


 -- William

--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org