Open Source Math

An anonymous reader writes "The American Mathematical society has an opinion piece about open source software vs propietary software used in mathematics. From the article : "Increasingly, proprietary software and the algorithms used are an essential part of mathematical proofs. To quote J. Neubüser, 'with this situation two of the most basic rules of conduct in mathematics are violated: In mathematics information is passed on free of charge and everything is laid open for checking.'""

Comments

Welcome to the world of modern research ...

[MacTO]

This problem goes beyond mathematics, and reaches into many of the sciences. Mathematicians and scientists often place undue trust in complex software systems, simply as a matter of getting the work done faster rather than producing higher quality research. Sometimes it is a case of handling large volumes of data, in which case human intelligence and discretion is a bottleneck. Sometimes it is a matter of finding numerical solutions where analytic ones are difficult (if not impossible) to find at present. And, in the case of mathematics, I'm guessing that they are using it as a shortcut for those difficult analytic solutions.

Then again, I must really ask if the mathematician in question understands what they are doing if they are using software as a shortcut for difficult analytic solutions. After all, if they don't understand the algorithms well enough to do the work themselves, who is going to say that they understand the limitations of the rules that they are asking the computer to apply.

Re:Python is part of the answer

[snarkh]

I have seen from personal experience, how a compiler error (some sort of incorrect optimization) led to a subtle difference in the results of a simple classification task.

The insidious thing about that particular result was that it looked very similar to the correct. In fact the difference would not have been found if two people did not run different versions of code independently (and more or less coincidentally) arriving to slightly different error rates.

Ruby could be the answer as well

[Gadzinka]

Python seems to deftly marry precision with looseness. When code is laid out in Python I find it is easier to see what it's trying to do than other languages. It's aesthetic qualities aside, it supports a number of features out of the box which I imagine would be ideal of mathematicians. To list a few, it's treating of lists and tuples as first class objects, support for large integers, complex numbers, it's ability to integrate with C for high-performance work.

I often think of Python as "basic done right" and it's ideal for mathematicians (or anybody) who don't want to think about programming but the problem at hand.

I could also recommend Ruby for the job. It has all the features you recommend, and more. If you could forget for a moment about the monstrosity that is Rails (I don't know, lobotomy might do the trick), the language in itself is quite beautiful.

There is one special feature of Ruby, that I miss in every single programming language I used since: iterator methods. Any time I want to iterate over elements of an array or hash I just do:

myhash.each_pair do |key,val|
  puts "#{key}: #{val}"
end

That's it, instant "anonymous function" given as a parameter in estetically pleasing syntax. In fact, "for" loop in Ruby is just obfuscated way of calling method #each on an object. But the madness doesn't stop here:

File::open("somefile.txt") do |fh|
  fh.each do |line|
      puts line
  end
end

It's a pity that so many people disregard Ruby as a "platform for Rails". It is a feature complete countepart to Python, and as my company high volume systems can attest, can handle anything other languages can handle.

Robert

Re:PDF rant.

[izomiac]

The main reason they should need a warning is because they aren't webpages. Either they get loaded through a browser plugin or they must be downloaded. In the former case, most browser plugins are slow to load, and nearly impossible to stop from loading, so a warning is nice. In the latter case they take a bit of effort to open and often people are too lazy (a warning isn't critical though). In both cases they are more inconvenient to use than HTML or text, so that's why I personally don't care for them. (IMHO, for online documents: html >= txt > rtf > pdf > jpg >> doc)

Open Source Software in Machine Learning

[mathgenius]

These guys are advocating setting up a peer-review process for open source software in machine learning. The idea is that this would encourage researchers to spend more time on the software component of the publication, and perhaps produce something that others can use aswell.
The article is in the Journal of Machine Learning Research.

Re:Libraries are NOT FREE.

[grcumb]

If they really want mathematics to be "free", then they can post the LaTeX's & the PDF's of these books on the internet for anyone to download, and they can pay for the server disk space & bandwidth THEMSELVES.

In the meantime, they can take their marxist hypocrisy and shove it right up their good-for-nothing, lazy, worthless asses.

Would these be the same kind of good-for-nothing, lazy, worthless asses who brought us Special Relativity while working in a lowly position in the Patent Office in Bern? You know, the kind who got together with friends to peruse and discuss the latest freely available scientific texts, the same texts that led him to revolutionise science more than anyone since Newton?

The books in the Princeton Library are free, thanks to the generousity of far-seeing individuals who realised that their money was better spent on a library than a new yacht. They, at least, saw the benefit of sharing knowledge with everyone, regardless of their means. I can only hope that, somewhere in that misanthropic little husk you call a heart, you will some day find room for a similar spirit of openness and sharing.