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."

Comments

Awesome

[riceboy50]

Now kids will only need to bring their iPhones to class instead of a calculator!

Re:Are you kidding?

[caffeinemessiah]

What a great use of time. Hey! Check this out! I've got AJAX for Mathematica!....But I just spent all this time porting an application to the web!

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:

1. Sell you a super-expensive license to use this super-charged, supercomputing version of Mathematica that runs on Wolfram's cluster. Trust me, a lot of computations in Mathematica take a very long time. If your computations are wearing down your laptop, simply pay $1000, upload your notebook and have your answer in no time.
2. No need to worry about grad students downloading pirated versions of Mathematica
3. Software updates are made seamlessly and instantly
4. Never worry about notebook backups, allows for collaboration a la Google docs
5. Did I mention point #1????

But what, exactly, is that saying?

[Quadraginta]

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.