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AJAX Version of Mathematica Coming
stoolpigeon writes "The O'Reilly School of Technology is teaming up with Wolfram Research to provide on-line math courses using an AJAX version of Mathematica. O'Reilly has posted an and interview with Scott Gray, the director of OST, that has more details on the program (named Hilbert after David Hilbert) itself as well as the classes they will be offering."
I would hope that the AJAX version would allow one to continue to use the same documentation. When I had to start using Mathematica for my courses, I invested in Boccara's Essentials of Mathematica , but I would hope to see that superseded.
I for one haven't heard the term, "AJAX", nearly enough.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Now kids will only need to bring their iPhones to class instead of a calculator!
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
I kid, I kid.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Sage also has an AJAX interface.
I've been making an effort to use Sage in place of Mathematica lately and so far I'm impressed. Although, right now I prefer using the CLI rather than the web interface.
I love AJAX. Seriously, I think it's great stuff, and it's fun to program. But why do some projects have this overwhelming desire to tout AJAX as the "ZOMG IT MAKE OUR PRODUCT ELEVENTY BILLION TIMES BETTER!!" tag with items like this?
What are the other improvements coming about with Mathematica? What about bugfixes? Wouldn't those be more important than "Oooooh, look, the page is more responsive now!"
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
I was just worrying about how to solve the problem of campus networks not having enough http traffic these days.
A group of computational mathematicians have named something after Hilbert? Shocking and newsworthy! Now, I'm off to take an erdos--it's gauss o'clock already, and I'm still wearing my eulers.
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
The reason why this is more than just another stupid AJAX port of a desktop app is that it allows for things like very, very easy supercomputing capabilities to be built into Mathematica -- just upload your notebook and let Wolfram's cluster crunch it for you. No munging with parallelization, or setting up and maintaining the hardware. Some other benefits (depending on point of view) of the AJAX port:
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Next year the Nation Mathlete Champions can say Ajax was here!!!
Somewhere in a dark place you will find:
www.m1
I thought Godel proved that the Hilbert Program was impossible. Now they want to write it in AJAX?
Or, you could use a computer algebra system which has easy-to-use distributed computation built in already. Oh, did I mention, it's open source, so every single point above (with possible exception of software updates) is completely invalidated?
Would be definitely cool, both for server-client communication and display.
\u262D = \u5350
The open source mathematic software compendium Sage already has something similar that you can test right away in SageNB. Interestingly, one of the possible backends is Mathematica.
To do list for Windows
Shameless plug much?
I'm just giving you a hard time. Actually, I've recently started using SAGE and I admit that it's very impressive for its age. I've been using Mathematica for nearly a decade and used Matlab extensively for my graduate research, but SAGE may end up replacing both for my projects.
Keep up the good work!
Sigs are for losers
I dunno. I've used Mathematica since it was beta -- no, really, I knew one of the founders at one point -- and it is certainly very interesting, and undoubtably very useful in the educational setting.
But I found when working on the algebra/calculus problems you might find in a bit of cutting-edge physical-science research, it wasn't all that helpful. If I didn't have a pretty good idea where I was trying to go -- e.g. how this algebra should reduce, or what this integral should be, or how this function should behave -- then Mathematica would often either (1) grind to a halt, or (2) give me a horrible multipage expression that defied any kind of gestalt understanding. And, of course, if I did know pretty well where I was going to go, then it was usually faster and somewhat more illuminating to do it myself on paper. What Mathematica ended up doing for me, and this is nothing to sneeze at, is checking my algebra and math, making sure I hadn't added 1 and 1 and gotten 11, that kind of thing.
My feeling is that Mathematica is great for educational stuff, and useful for quick and simple calculations where you pretty much know the answer but don't want to do invest the time it would take to work it out on paper (and you'll instantly recognize whether the result is what it should be), and generally useful for checking your math. But as a serious tool to do difficult math for you with useful results -- I would say it hasn't worked out so well. There's some curious facet of human intelligence that it lacks, some ability to grasp the essentials of a mathematical expression or process that it doesn't have. I admit I can't defined what "the essentials" of a piece of math are, but I can tell when I understand them and when I don't, and probably anyone who's worked with a lot of complex math can, too. (Indeed, I suspect the truly brilliant at math are those who can grasp these mysterious essentials faster and with more clarity than the rest of us.)
I'm not trying to diss Mathematica per se; it's a substantial accomplishment. But like most of Wolfram's stuff, it falls a smidgen short of being the Singularity-enabling tool its most rabid fans seem to think it is.
A) If they have a bunch of students actually checking the output, maybe now Mathematica will put out some correct answers. Stephen found yet another way to get free QA instead of using his customers for it.
B) Free supercomputing is right...you'll need that just to render a cube in 3D. I can't begin to comprehend how they're going to pass the bloated graphics from the kernel through the web interface. Right now just rendering around 50K polygons will bring most machines to their knees (both through intense ram usage and cpu usage).
(And yes I'm a coward, I'm under NDA from the evil overlord of Wolfram).
move along
The marketing meeting parody almost writes itself: "Guys, how can we possibly make our slow, bloated software even slower and even more bloated while making it buzzword-compliant?"
In the Sage (AJAX...) notebook we https://www.sagenb.org/home/pub/1693/render
a 3d cube using the
awesome Jmol library.
Axiom and maxima both work fine for me. Admittedly, I don't use them for much more than the occasional nasty integral.
Wolfram is evil. I once bought a copy of the mac version of Mathematica from them, to run on MacOS 6, IIRC. When I upgraded to MacOS 7, it stopped working. Called Wolfram, they said I should pay for a new version of Mathematica.
Find free books.
If you like Lisp you like Mathematica. If you like FORTRAN you like MATLAB. If you like Python you like SAGE.
MATLAB is not, repeat not, better at numerics. Not since ancient times. What lowered performance was a linked-list implementation that went away long ago. Here's a Cal Tech CS prof comparing the languages. And he hates Wolfram!
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2220#comment-33430
Now SAGE is interesting. It bundles Maxima, a weaker old-style Lisp, with Python, a friendly yet dumbed-down language. Python numerics teams spent ~8 years doing arrays, over and over, and are still not done. I don't even track it any more - NumPy? NumericalPython? Whatever. They won't even let you define irregular arrays. And Guido avoids anything functional because he can't understand it.
To each his own, but functional code matches math best. Everyone knows this, and Guido is not trying to build a math language, so it's not his problem.
SAGE does the kitchen-sink approach with Python glue. They take GPL libs from everywhere and stick em together. Well, good on them. Open source needs this.
But compared to Mathematica they are not there yet. In certain sub modules they have world class algorithms. What SAGE lacks interactive typesetting and overall integration. Python and old-style Lisp is not a marriage made in heaven. SAGE also needs to implement typesetting the way Mathematica does it - not post-processing, but real typeset interaction. I am cheering for them but..still being rational about software choice.
When I can look at SAGE notebooks that have typeset code for both input and output AND that use a better functional language than Python or Maxima, I will switch to SAGE.
The new Mathematica with all the dynamic interface stuff lets you ship programs to non-owners. The free player contains a full working kernel to run your apps. It's nice when things *can* run in a browser but not everything can. AFAICT the player just doesn't create code.
Too bad for those who must, by some reason, use Mathematica... It is probably the biggest mystery of a software of all times, for instance, the code syntax used are unique to Mathematica and a complete mess, it doesn't make sense at all and reminds me of no other language. Wolfram Is also the evil empire I have heard, treating their customers incredibly inappropriate. I used Mathematica for a project... I ended up wanted to smash my keyboard mainy due to the idiotic-style coding and the general moron-behavior of Mathematica's front end... then I tried Maple - and since then I'll never touch Mathematica again. Avoid Mathematica at all cost - use Maple or some free alternative.
There are easier to develop and maintain environements out there than multi-language ones. Believe me, I've going through the grief. This is a rapidly evolving field.
Am I the only one who recalls the unethical crap we all had to put up with from Wolfram publishing?
1. I buy their software, and pay for overnight S/H. I get it, and it needs to be activated - not by web, but by a human on the phone - before it can be used. This takes 2 weeks due to some overseas holiday I've never heard of.
2. I set up a web site complaining, and they send phony DMCA take-down notices, saying that I'm distributing pirated versions of their software.
3. Wolfram has been proven to have sent many, many phony DMCA take-down notices against anyone who criticized their favorite senator, Orin Hatch. This is the same Orin Hatch that wants a chip (fuse) in your PC that Wolfram can blow to permanently ruin it if they don't like you. No due process would apply.
If you do business with Wolfram, you are no better than IBM doing business with NAZI Germany.
Andy
I used both too (robotics, control loops, firmware, RK4 sim), and this comment is silly. CAS is crap for "in the loop" operation, which by definition, means hardware. You're hammering with a screwdriver.
LabVIEW RT? VxWorks? RTOS? Even embedded Linux maybe. But not MATLAB. I think you're a victim of MATLAB/Simulink salesmen telling you that CAS is for HiL sims when it's not. You're better off writing FORTRAN that talks to your hardware.
For pure sims (zero h/w) it's another story. CAS can do that. Mathematica has new FEA meshing btw, some Runge-Kutta helper routines, and quaternions and interval math. There is also GPL Scicos for feedback control system design from the great INRIA folks.
So a gutless coward labels me as a Troll? F*** Y**. Wolfram if he values himself should do the world a favor and do something for Science that progresses the system forward. AJAX? Give me a f***ing break. If Javascript was so f***ing cool then why did we spit on it for years when Netscape tried to make it cool?