Sage Talk at the Open Knowledge Conference in London
Martin Albrecht
Rufus Pollock an organiser of the annual Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon)
invited the Sage project to present there (more specifically he asked Fernando
Perez and Fernando kindly pointed him to Sage because he cannot attend).
I am going to give a 10-20 minute talk on Saturday 15. March 2008 at London
School of Economics between 12:00 - 13:15.
I've uploaded a beta of my slides to:
http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/malb/okcon.pdf
Since the talk is for 'the Sage project' be critical!
I am not sure what to expect from the audience but this snipped from Rufus'
mail might help to get a feeling about the event:
---------
## Event Details
Full information about the event, including full details of time and
location and the up to date programme can be found on the event website at:
## Subject Matter
There is no specific area that you should cover so you should feel free
to talk about whatever you thought was interesting. That said our theme
is 'Applications, Tools and Services' (for the full blurb see
http://www.okfn.org/okcon/) so anything that related to this would be
particularly welcome. For example, questions you might want to
address include:
* How do we develop tools and approaches for dealing with open
data/information/knowledge that facilitate sharing and reuse.
* Are there important interdependencies between open material and the
tools to visualize and analyze that material. That is do we need data to
be able to develop the tools and tools in order to get the data (i.e.
for it to be made available.
* What applications and serivces are there that would particularly
benefit from an open approach (and why).
Regarding the audience we tend to have a fairly diverse audience
including scientists, 'geeks', academics and policy-makers but all
sharing an interest in 'Open Knowledge'. Generally we suggest pitching
the talk at the intelligent non-specialist.
## Structure
Each speaker should speak for between 10 and 20 minutes. There will be
three speakers in each session and we aim to have 10-30 minutes of
discussion (depending on how long each speaker talks for).
---------
Cheers,
Martin
--
name: Martin Albrecht
_pgp: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8EF0DC99
_www: http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~malb
_jab: martinr...@jabber.ccc.de
Simon King
The title of your talk seems rather negative to me:
"A Viable Alternative to Magma, Mathematica, Maple and Matlab"
This title does not mention the subject of your talk (which is
SAGE !). While the implied definition/description of Sage is good as a
mission statement, it suggests that Sage is nothing but an attempt to
mimic Mathematica et.al., which, as much as i know, is not the case.
I think there has been discussion (on sage-devel?) about how to define
Sage.
What about "SAGE: A unified open source platform for mathematical
computations" ?
On slide 11 ("What is Sage?") you might mention how much software is
actually included in the Sage distribution. Wasn't it >70 GNU-licensed
CAS and in total more than 5,000,000 lines of code? I think these
numbers are impressive!
Also i think one can skip the example "2+3==5", it isn't a
particularly surprising example. But i guess the life demo will be
more impressive.
Good luck for your talk!
Simon
William Stein
<ma...@informatik.uni-bremen.de> wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
> Rufus Pollock an organiser of the annual Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon)
>
> http://www.okfn.org/
>
> invited the Sage project to present there (more specifically he asked Fernando
> Perez and Fernando kindly pointed him to Sage because he cannot attend).
>
> I am going to give a 10-20 minute talk on Saturday 15. March 2008 at London
> School of Economics between 12:00 - 13:15.
>
> I've uploaded a beta of my slides to:
>
> http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/malb/okcon.pdf
>
I really like the talk!
Page 15 contains a typo: "ciphers r[blank space]ings, whatever" (note
the blank space).
Another here "physic[ space]s".
Anyway, I really like this talk for the intended audience and time.
--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org
William Stein
<ki...@mathematik.uni-jena.de> wrote:
>
> Dear Martin,
>
> The title of your talk seems rather negative to me:
> "A Viable Alternative to Magma, Mathematica, Maple and Matlab"
>
> This title does not mention the subject of your talk (which is
> SAGE !). While the implied definition/description of Sage is good as a
> mission statement, it suggests that Sage is nothing but an attempt to
> mimic Mathematica et.al., which, as much as i know, is not the case.
>
> I think there has been discussion (on sage-devel?) about how to define
> Sage.
> What about "SAGE: A unified open source platform for mathematical
> computations" ?
>
I don't find the title negative. Sage really is about a single clear
goal, and that goal is to create a truly viable alternative to all of
Maple, Mathematica,
Matlab, and Magma. The goal isn't about "paradigm shifts" or changing
the world or anything. It's just creating a _viable_ alternative.
The difficulty
and value of doing that should not be underestimated.
> On slide 11 ("What is Sage?") you might mention how much software is
> actually included in the Sage distribution. Wasn't it >70 GNU-licensed
> CAS and in total more than 5,000,000 lines of code? I think these
> numbers are impressive!
">70 GNU-licensed CAS" is not right -- it's "about 70 packages" that do
a wide range of things, many having little to do with CAS, but all under
a GPL-compatible license (not necessary GPL).
The 5 million lines of code is true, and impressive, but potentially
misleading.
> Also i think one can skip the example "2+3==5", it isn't a
> particularly surprising example. But i guess the life demo will be
> more impressive.
>
> Good luck for your talk!
> Simon
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >
>
--
Martin Albrecht
> Dear Martin,
>
> The title of your talk seems rather negative to me:
> "A Viable Alternative to Magma, Mathematica, Maple and Matlab"
>
> This title does not mention the subject of your talk (which is
> SAGE !). While the implied definition/description of Sage is good as a
> mission statement, it suggests that Sage is nothing but an attempt to
> mimic Mathematica et.al., which, as much as i know, is not the case.
Well I guess I end up trashing Mathematica a lot in this talk (the excerpt
from their website and their price) but the existence of these tools
motivates and motivated many Sage developers.The need to have Sage is visible
if one compares the functionality of the big Ms with the functionality of the
open-source world. As the first part of the talk is focused on presenting how
bad the situation in mathematics is, my impression is that the title fits. On
the other hand, I have no hard feelings about it.
> I think there has been discussion (on sage-devel?) about how to define
> Sage. What about "SAGE: A unified open source platform for mathematical
> computations" ?
I don't think a consensus was reached and I am actually not sure such a
definition is needed. Do you think it needs to be defined this way?
> On slide 11 ("What is Sage?") you might mention how much software is
> actually included in the Sage distribution. Wasn't it >70 GNU-licensed
> CAS and in total more than 5,000,000 lines of code? I think these
> numbers are impressive!
I've added the fact that Sage ships over 70 packages.
> Also i think one can skip the example "2+3==5", it isn't a
> particularly surprising example. But i guess the life demo will be
> more impressive.
I sure hope so. The 2+3 = 5 example kinda became the canonical Sage example
and thus I included it. Many talks had it as the first example and I don't
want to break this silly little tradition :-).
I've uploaded a printout of the actual live demo to:
http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/malb/okcon_demo.pdf
> Good luck for your talk!
Thanks (also for the feedback)!
William Stein
Here's an interactive version of the elliptic curve point plotting example:
E = EllipticCurve('37a')
@interact
def _(p=slider(prime_range(2000), default=997)):
show(E)
print "p = %s"%p
show(E.change_ring(GF(p)).plot(),xmin=0,ymin=0)
Carl Witty
wrote:
More discussion on the title (sorry)...
I agree with Simon that the title should mention Sage. Also, while I
like "A Viable Alternative to Magma, Mathematica, Maple and Matlab" in
general, it doesn't feel quite right as the title of a talk aimed at
"the intelligent non-specialist"... it seems possible that many of
your audience will not have used any of these systems, so the title
won't mean much to them.
Carl
Franco Saliola
> More discussion on the title (sorry)...
>
> I agree with Simon that the title should mention Sage.
"Sage: A Viable Alternative to Magma, Mathematica, Maple and Matlab"?
Franco
--
Iftikhar Burhanuddin
Good job on the slides. An audio recording of your talk will be of great
value. (Anyone giving a talk which discusses Sage should try their best
to record the talk and the Q&A.)
My feeback follows the email.
Regards,
Ifti
===
* page 1: The current title is better of as a subtitle. The title of the
talk should include Sage. 'Sage: A Viable Alternative to Magma,
Mathematica, Maple and Matlab', perhaps?
* page 2: Epilog or Epilogue
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epilogue
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/epilogue
* page 5: 2035! pounds is a lot of money. ;)
* page 7: Indicate the date on which William's email excerpt surfaced on
sage-devel.
* page 9: However, these don't interact too well*.*
* page 10: "Mess with the best" is tres anarchist.
* page 10: mailing*-*lists
* page 10: 'workshops' instead of 'meetings', perhaps?
* page 11: The '2+3=5' example is as canonical as a 'Hello World'
program.
* page 13: Python pickle instead of Python Pickles.
* page 15: (via Sage)*.*
* page 16: worksheet *up/down-*load
* page 22: Provide a caption for the picture: 'Class Hierarchy Diagram'.
Martin Albrecht
below some remarks on your suggestions. Anything not remarked below is a done
job, i.e. I changed the slides accordingly.
> * page 1: The current title is better of as a subtitle. The title of the
> talk should include Sage. 'Sage: A Viable Alternative to Magma,
> Mathematica, Maple and Matlab', perhaps?
It has to be (and is now): "Sage: Creating a Viable blablabla" then because
Sage isn't quite there yet.
> * page 10: "Mess with the best" is tres anarchist.
I like it, are you objecting militantly?
> * page 22: Provide a caption for the picture: 'Class Hierarchy Diagram'.
This is only supposed to look nice, it is not even the full hierarchy.
David Joyner
<ma...@informatik.uni-bremen.de> wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
> Rufus Pollock an organiser of the annual Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon)
>
> http://www.okfn.org/
>
> invited the Sage project to present there (more specifically he asked Fernando
> Perez and Fernando kindly pointed him to Sage because he cannot attend).
>
> I am going to give a 10-20 minute talk on Saturday 15. March 2008 at London
> School of Economics between 12:00 - 13:15.
>
> I've uploaded a beta of my slides to:
>
> http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/malb/okcon.pdf
>
I'm actually on their email list, so I think I have a sense of your
audience. I think there is not one mathematician in the group, at least
none active on the list (I'm a "lurker" - I was hoping to be more active
but just have lacked the time). Jonathan Gray is somewhat involved with the
math side. I would guess that they are mostly on the non-scientific side,
in fact. So I throwing around terms like "GAP" and "Mathematica" will
not register with a lot of folks without some verbal clues. Rather
than particular
mathematical tricks that SAGE can do, you might think about giving them
some idea of how fast SAGE has grown, in it's code base, user base, and
developer base, over the past year or so.
I don't want to give the impression that they are not hard working or
non-intellectual. In fact, the email list is quite active and
they have regular (weekly?) IRC "meetings" (which I don't participate
in either).
Just that they don't seem very scientific. For example, I would not be
surprised
if a large proportion of member turn out to be university librarians or
UK government researchers.
Hope this helps you think about the target audience.
Iftikhar Burhanuddin
>
>
> below some remarks on your suggestions. Anything not remarked below is a done
> job, i.e. I changed the slides accordingly.
>
> > * page 1: The current title is better of as a subtitle. The title of the
> > talk should include Sage. 'Sage: A Viable Alternative to Magma,
> > Mathematica, Maple and Matlab', perhaps?
>
> It has to be (and is now): "Sage: Creating a Viable blablabla" then because
> Sage isn't quite there yet.
>
> > * page 10: "Mess with the best" is tres anarchist.
>
> I like it, are you objecting militantly?
Yes, but in a pacifistic manner. ;)
Regards,
Ifti
Martin Albrecht
thanks for your hints on the expected audience. I added a slide called 'Open
Knowledge' to the presentation to outline how patches (which are knowledge
after all) are treated in Sage (JSage, reviews etc)
Ondrej Certik
<ma...@informatik.uni-bremen.de> wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
> Rufus Pollock an organiser of the annual Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon)
>
> http://www.okfn.org/
>
> invited the Sage project to present there (more specifically he asked Fernando
> Perez and Fernando kindly pointed him to Sage because he cannot attend).
>
> I am going to give a 10-20 minute talk on Saturday 15. March 2008 at London
> School of Economics between 12:00 - 13:15.
>
> I've uploaded a beta of my slides to:
>
> http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/malb/okcon.pdf
>
> Since the talk is for 'the Sage project' be critical!
>
> I am not sure what to expect from the audience but this snipped from Rufus'
> mail might help to get a feeling about the event:
I read the talk and I also think it's excellent.
Ondrej
Jan Groenewald
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 01:17:05PM +0100, Ondrej Certik wrote:
> > http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/malb/okcon.pdf
> > Since the talk is for 'the Sage project' be critical!
> I read the talk and I also think it's excellent.
Cool, but why beamer? Doesn't SAGE do presentations yet :-P
Jan
--
.~.
/V\ Jan Groenewald
/( )\ www.aims.ac.za
^^-^^