Re: [sage-devel] Re: Maple versus Mathematica

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William Stein

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Dec 1, 2014, 1:45:12 AM12/1/14
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On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 10:38 PM, Nathann Cohen <nathan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "1) Be friendly and patient." (sorry can't resist)

:-) You're right -- I guess after 10 years, I'm starting to seriously
lose my patience.

> I would say that most of us are only using Sage for research, and that
> we are not the kind of developpers who will fulfull your mission

Good point -- I'm cross posting this to the sage-edu mailing list.

> statement. We would all be happy if we can say one day that "Sage is
> the best software to work on <insert your research field here>".

Unfortunately, Sage is still very, very far from being that in
arithmetic geometry (my field)...

> You probably need people here who behave more as teachers than
> researchers. There is a wealth of math topics that none of us deals
> with, because we are so specialized.

You're right -- we definitely need to encourage way more such people
to get involved with Sage.

> How would you attract teachers here? How would you convince them that
> Sage is THE tool for teaching ? (no mention of research)

Great questions! I could start by being more friendly and patient.

Gregory Bard did a lot this year in that direction though, with his book.

Paul Zimmerman did a huge amount in that direction with the French
book he edited on Sage for undergrad teaching (which was a huge
project).

-- William

>
> Nathann
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--
William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org

Nathann Cohen

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Dec 1, 2014, 2:05:52 AM12/1/14
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Yo !

> :-) You're right -- I guess after 10 years, I'm starting to seriously lose my
> patience.

I believe that we should be allowed to lose our patience after 10
years. 6 months seems to be a lot already.

> Gregory Bard did a lot this year in that direction though, with his book.
>
>
> Paul Zimmerman did

Paul Zimmerman "and 10 other guys" :-P

> a huge amount in that direction with the French book he edited on Sage for
> undergrad teaching (which was a huge project).

Hmmmmm... Well, the thing is that I am not sure most university teachers care a
lot about the amount of money spent on Maple/Mathematica licenses. Just trying
to ask around how much it costs convinced me that nobody knew.

We will not be convincing if we just come and tell them "come use Sage, it's
almost like Maple !". If it does not make teaching easier for them, we will be
in trouble.

I forgot all I knew of Maple and Matlab. I believe that what we do best (besides
having a 'real' programming language: Python) is create objects that represent
the mathematical notions students use. What about beginning like that ? Looking
at a math book, and make sure that all definitions correspond to some
mathematical object, or a property of such an object ?

Can we even define a function between two sets and ask
"is_bijection/is_surjection", or "is_increasing" or "is_continuous" or
"is_differentiable" ? Can we take the preimage of some set and see if it is
connected ? Can we list saddle points ?

Nathann
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Nathann Cohen

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Dec 1, 2014, 2:53:03 AM12/1/14
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Hello !

> That's right. Do you (or any of the authors of this book...) know whether
> an English/German/Spanish/... translation or a similar project in another
> language is planned? That could be a good way to show teachers that Sage is
> well-suited for classes.

Kanappan wanted to work on an english translation at some point, but
there was no news since and he work in Canada nowadays. Not sure that
he has a lot of time for that.

> I guess the number of available books on Maple and
> Mathematica is a reason for some teachers to choose these languages. To my
> mind, it would be much more efficient (though maybe more work too) than a
> marketing document!

The good thing is that we do not even have to chose between the two.

And +1 to Jori's comments about exceptions and visualizations features.

Nathann

kcrisman

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Dec 1, 2014, 11:11:58 AM12/1/14
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> That's right. Do you (or any of the authors of this book...) know whether
> an English/German/Spanish/... translation or a similar project in another
> language is planned? That could be a good way to show teachers that Sage is
> well-suited for classes.

Kanappan wanted to work on an english translation at some point, but
there was no news since and he work in Canada nowadays. Not sure that
he has a lot of time for that.



Yes, and any more localizations of material will be welcome.  Perhaps some people on this list have tutorials they have created that are not in the official Sage documentation in languages other than English and French? 

pang

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Dec 1, 2014, 12:47:53 PM12/1/14
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When I was a teacher at the university I wrote a proof-of-concept website with this idea in mind:

- The sage developer workflow is too complicated for most university professors teaching Mathematics. Not every mathematician can contribute quality code to sage, but many could contribute quality teaching material. I didn't find reasonable that in order to contribute a translation to a tutorial, or a new lesson/course/thematic tutorial, a teacher would have to learn version control, pass all tests, wait for a review, etc. I mean, Sage keeps working fine if one of the thematic tutorials has a bug in the code.

So I wrote a website inspired by wikibooks, where any user could sign up, drop in a sws file, that would be converted to rst text, or directly the rst files, with chapters and all that. Then the website would compile that into docs, warn of mistakes, run the tests against all active versions of sage, and keep track of translations of that tutorial/course/lesson/whatever.

I presented a prototype to the Sage community in Spain and the idea didn't spark a lot of interest, so I forgot about it. Probably, I didn't sell ReStructuredText fine enough, I think latex is too popular in Spain.

I don't think the code is worth much, but what do you think about the idea? It's somewhere between the old "publish notebook" button, that was too chaotic, and the "contribute to the sage codebase", which was too complicated.

sage-goo...@lma.metelu.net

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Dec 1, 2014, 2:43:05 PM12/1/14
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Hi,


Le lundi 1 décembre 2014 18:47:53 UTC+1, pang a écrit :
So I wrote a website inspired by wikibooks, where any user could sign up, drop in a sws file, that would be converted to rst text, or directly the rst files, with chapters and all that. Then the website would compile that into docs, warn of mistakes, run the tests against all active versions of sage, and keep track of translations of that tutorial/course/lesson/whatever.

I presented a prototype to the Sage community in Spain and the idea didn't spark a lot of interest, so I forgot about it. Probably, I didn't sell ReStructuredText fine enough, I think latex is too popular in Spain.

I don't think the code is worth much, but what do you think about the idea? It's somewhere between the old "publish notebook" button, that was too chaotic, and the "contribute to the sage codebase", which was too complicated.

We (at least i) are extremely interested in such code. Luca, Vincent and myself wrote a website for indexing sage ressources on the web (lectures, worksheets, books,...), see http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/16114 (we are a bit late in publishing a beta version but we have a good prototype to start discussing about). We didnt' wrote a repository since we are at a point where perhaps people will write mostly ipynb files (and we were therefore thinking to use some existing code like http://nbviewer.ipython.org/ since ipython notebooks exist beyond Sage).
 
So, one could imagine a repository.sagemath.org website to host some worksheets that people can not host by themselves, and index.sagemath.org for an index that idexes all ressources available on the web (not only those published repository.sagemath.org but also personal webpages, public sage notebooks,...). Also, repository.sagemath.org could host the public worksheets of the old sagenb.org that went down because of spam. Note that spam (javascript injection iirc) may be an issue for a new repository as well.

As for the index, we wrote it in django (a python web framework), how is yours written ? Can we download it somewhere and give a try ?

Ciao,
Thierry

pang

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Dec 2, 2014, 4:42:17 AM12/2/14
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It was based on web2py, it is old, and there wasn't any ipython notebook at the time. I now have some knowledge about that framework, but at the time it was rather limited: just a rapid prototyping tool. Don't expect it to scale, or be fancy, or anything, but hey, it still works:

- Download
- Untar
- Run python web2py.py
- Type an admin password
- Change the username and password:
http://127.0.0.1:8000/sagepedia/appadmin/update/db/auth_user/1
- Login and browse

For it to work there should be a cron job or something. I don't remember details, but the cron folder will give you an idea.

Thanks for your interest.

Thierry

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Dec 2, 2014, 10:15:20 AM12/2/14
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Hi,

thanks for the file, i will have a look.

Ciao,
Thierry
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kcrisman

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Dec 5, 2014, 9:01:18 PM12/5/14
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Thanks for passing Greg's evaluation of this on - that sounds about right.  (sage-edu, see https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sage-devel/x3h4m3LjWkI/gKfpnAijS5UJ )

I do think that more books is a real "selling" point.  Remember how you were contacted about the Use-Sage series...  I will again be road-testing my number theory text (nearly orthogonal to yours, William) this spring, for what it's worth, but I think if we can come up with creative (possibly non-monetary, or not primarily that) incentives to have people write more Sage-enabled texts, it will be key.

Even better would be to find people to write lab manuals for texts that already have significant portions in other languages but that are essentially language-agnostic.  I can think of several I have *used* off the top of my head.   Getting Sage as a 'normal' solution to go along with such texts will be very useful.  (But who will do this?  It will require work that will likely be unrewarded by both tenure committees and publishers.)

Razvan Alex Mezei

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Dec 13, 2014, 1:00:50 AM12/13/14
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In MATH courses: I used SAGE for a Numerical Analysis course. And recently I submitted a book for publication that uses SAGE for the implementation of numerical algorithms. Also I will prepare a workshop at a sectional MAA meeting that should advertise SAGE to even more educators.  Personally, I love the sagecell features that does not involve any installation. It's lightweight, and always up-to-date.

I also teach CS courses, and it can be of great use in our CS 0 course. I plan to use it more extensively in CS 0, the next time I teach it. Since it is open source, it has a great potential to be introduced in CS2 courses, where students learn about data structures, recursivity, etc.  Ideally (but I am still far behind on this matter) I would like to get involved with the development of Sage, and also involve senior students to work on Capstone projects that will involve Sage.


So I think the future is very bright. 
Alex.
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kcrisman

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Dec 13, 2014, 11:55:18 AM12/13/14
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In MATH courses: I used SAGE for a Numerical Analysis course. And recently I submitted a book for publication that uses SAGE for the implementation of numerical algorithms.

Cool!  Let us know when it appears so we can add it to the list.   And of course any functionality you were missing, let us know that too :)
 
Also I will prepare a workshop at a sectional MAA meeting that should advertise SAGE to even more educators.  Personally, I love the sagecell features that does not involve any installation. It's lightweight, and always up-to-date.


I would highly encourage anyone here to do this.  I know that in Iowa and out here in New England and in the Pacific Northwest people know more about Sage because of such low-risk, friendly events.   I would be happy to help anyone with what such an event could look like as well.

 
I also teach CS courses, and it can be of great use in our CS 0 course. I plan to use it more extensively in CS 0, the next time I teach it. Since it is open source, it has a great potential to be introduced in CS2 courses, where students learn about data structures, recursivity, etc.  Ideally (but I am still far behind on this matter) I would like to get involved with the development of Sage, and also involve senior students to work on Capstone projects that will involve Sage.



Especially combined with the IPython notebook.

 
So I think the future is very bright. 

+1
Thanks for the encouragement!

Miguel Angel Marco

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Dec 29, 2014, 3:04:48 PM12/29/14
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As part of a teaching innovation project, i have set up a website in that spirit. It is a MoinMoin wiki with a (slightly modified) sagecell parser, so you can add sage cells to pages. I have also written a (very hacky) action plugin to upload a .sws file and add its content at the end of the wiki page. It has a lot of limitations (problems with the encoding, no exception handling...) but it somehow works.

You can check it out at http://riemann.unizar.es/sage-wiki

So far there is very little content (only a couple of pages really) and it is all in spanish. But you are welcome to create an account, and test it (for instance, creating some pages in other languages). So far registration is open to everybody. If at some point we find that people are abusing, we could implement some extra security.

The action to upload a .sws file is called SubirHoja. I have just created a github repo with it in https://github.com/miguelmarco/LoadSws/

I am now working on the reverse: that is, download a wiki page as a .sws file.

If someone would like to give me a hand with it, i would really appreciate it.

kcrisman

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Feb 17, 2015, 9:20:25 PM2/17/15
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I am now working on the reverse: that is, download a wiki page as a .sws file.

If someone would like to give me a hand with it, i would really appreciate it.

I highly recommend looking at the code for sage-rst2sws as a model.  If the wiki syntax is as strict as rst syntax, it should be fairly straightforward to turn that into html tags, which can then be zipped up into a worksheet file. 
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