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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.'""
Thanks for the article, now some crazed company is going to try to copyright math.
I am no a mathematician but surely if you're going to submit a computer aided proof you must submit a full copy of the program. The are all manor of subtle mistakes that can be made in a program that could cause serious problems with a proof.
Suppose you inspect the source and find it to be faultless, how can you trust the compiler. And if you hand compile the compiler, how can you trust the CPU? Surely it's turtles all the way down.
In many ways, establishing the correctness of a computer-aided proof is very much like security engineering. You want to verify that the whole software stack is operating correctly before you can trust the result. Having the source-code is a pre-requisite to this exercise.
Changing to topic slightly, I was particularly heartened to see that the open-source mathematics framework being developed one of the authors of the article involves the use of Python.
My immediate thought when seeing the title to the article was "Python is the answer." When some problem or algorithm intrigues me the first thing that happens is that I reach for the Python interpreter.
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.
Simon
"While it was typeset with TeX (open), only the PDF (closed and uneditable) is provided."
Indeed. Now we are left wondering whether the TeX code is buggy. Like maybe an extra character accidentally slipped into the file.
therefore mathematics software should %not
be open source!
Now we'll never know.
Look around you. Look around you!
That's how I learned maths in high school.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
I'm not going to disagree with the "laid open" part, but the "free of charge" nonsense is just typical marxist university professor hypocrisy.
Let's price some math texts:
Or try a few titles which might be a little more familiar to Slashdotters:
Princeton, which has the finest mathematics department in the world [or at least had the finest mathematics department in the world, before Harold Shapiro & Shirley Tilghman decided they wanted to turn the