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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 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.
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 was just worrying about how to solve the problem of campus networks not having enough http traffic these days.
fprintf('I knew there had to be a MATLAB joke in there somewhere\n')
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I love AJAX too. It's the only thing that gets those pesky sweat stains out after long hours of developing asynchronous web applications. It also works well for getting rid of Java.
Kid you may, but Mathematica is a computer algebra system, which means its good at manipulating symbolic mathematics. Matlab is primarily used for vector/matrix manipulation and is more engineering-oriented. I wish people would realize that in spite of the many commonalities (including the prefix "Mat"), they are different products with different uses and audiences.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
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.
If I understand your point - I think you are missing an important piece of information. It was not previously a web app.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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..
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?
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
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.
Of course, MATLAB has the Symbolic Math Toolbox, which "includes the most recent computational kernel from Waterloo Maple Software, Maple 10", thereby completing the Matlab/Maple/Mathematica circle of confusion.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
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?"
Had to, or were too lazy to go without?
Mathematica is a blight upon the scientific world. The price is outrageous, the code is closed source and the learning curve never stops rising. The thing is like some kind of religious oracle; arcane, totally inscrutable, and regarded by almost everyone as infallible. Did I mention the price?
It would be nice to see an open source, scrutable and affordable counterpart to Mathematica. Something like GNU Octave is to Matlab. Looks like it's never going to happen though. Maxima, Sage and Axiom all fail to make the grade, and have infuriating names besides. The situation is less and less likely to change as people who "have" to use Mathematica in their courses keep entrenching the thing deeper and deeper.
Did I mention the price?
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
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.
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.
May the Maths Be with you!