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

Re:Is my documentation worthless?

[Brian Gordon]

I am so not impressed by this.. the self-styled "kernel" that actually does anything in Mathematica is already a separate executable, and there are multiple open source frontends to the mathematica kernel. So basically they're just using ol CGI to access the kernel and making some javascript frontend that does the exact same thing as existing frontends, but in a browser..

Re:But what, exactly, is that saying?

[suburbanmediocrity]

I used both significantly, and while you can kinda do more or less the same thing with both platforms, each has their place and I would hate to do some things on one that are trivial on the other. I've also been a Mathematica user since beta, but unfortunately this was at the very end of my college career.

Mathematica really isn't set up for in the loop type operations or engineering design (for mortal engineers), but it can be done with effort. That effort is a bit more than the $6k for the equivalent matlab/toolbox licenses. OTH, trying to find the closed form solution to many problems can be done with symbolic toolbox in Matlab, but it's just so much better with Mathematica and less expensive.

The new front end with 6.0 goes a long way to eliminating many of Mathematica's shortcomings in these respects, but I think it's mostly just the framework for much better things to come...I'm hoping.

Re:Is my documentation worthless?

[mhansen444]

Maxima, Sage and Axiom all fail to make the grade, and have infuriating names besides.
Could you elaborate a bit more on hwo you feel Sage "fails to make the grade"? We are definitely interested in feedback to help improve things.

That being said, I think a lot of it is really dependent on the type of math you are interested in doing. For me personally, using Mathematica would be a waste of my time while I've been able to be pretty productive using Sage.

Re:Is my documentation worthless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maxima. In conjunction with gnuplot. It does everything I needed Mathmatica for, and it's easier for me to export stuff to eps and include in my LaTeX formatted homework.

Re:Is my documentation worthless?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Could you elaborate a bit more on hwo you feel Sage "fails to make the grade"? We are definitely interested in feedback to help improve things.

Before you make a polynomial in Sage, you have to declare a polynomial ring.

I find it difficult to adequately express just how asinine this requirement is. And I'm a mathematician!

Sage is to Maxima is to Mathematica as Vim is to Emacs is to Word. I'm an Emacs fan myself.