A free copy of Maple or a frre maple webservre
2
Please forgove the spellig, I am forig. I amm posting anonymously. Maple is
very expensive to purchase. What is the
best way to get a pirate copy?
Anltativley, do you please know os a frre maple webserver that I can access
anonumously?
Please don't email my fake email address it will get bounce. The best whay
for you to replay is from a similar fake email account. Please remember that
I am nimber 2. Thank you.
2
Dave
Sage 3.0.1 was released a few days ago
Why not try that, rather than asking for a pirate copy of Maple? It is
legally free. If you have $10, you can buy a book on it from Amazon
There is an online Sage notebook at
you need to sign up for an account, but it is free.
Martin Rubey
> Hi,
>
> Please forgove the spellig, I am forig. I amm posting anonymously. Maple is
> very expensive to purchase. What is the
> best way to get a pirate copy?
Unless you are required by your teacher to use maple (in which case I think
using a pirate copy is somewhat legitmate), I'd advise you to check out one of
the many free alternatives. Many of them are even better than their commercial
counterparts *in certain areas*.
There is a list of free computer algebra systems here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_computer_algebra_systems
I personally use (and develop for) FriCAS / Axiom. SAGE has already been
mentioned, Maxima is also well known. As far as I know the others are more
specialised. (Please correct me if I'm mistaken.)
Hope this helps,
Martin
2
[snip]
> Sage 3.0.1 was released a few days ago
>
> http://www.sagemath.org/
>
> Why not try that, rather than asking for a pirate copy of Maple? It is
> legally free. If you have $10, you can buy a book on it from Amazon
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Sage-Tutorial-www-sagemath-org-William-Stein/dp/1438214197/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210078569&sr=8-1
>
> There is an online Sage notebook at
>
> https://www.sagenb.org/
>
> you need to sign up for an account, but it is free.
Thank you Dave. Let me explain, more. I am interested in doing symbolic math
that is verifiable and with least effort on my part. I learned Maple in a
one semester 900 level graduate course. That took a lot of effort. With that
effort I was able to write one theoretical paper that was published in an
international nuclear journal. So my effort was not in vain. I've had a
superficial look at Sage. The problem I see, is that I would need to
duplicate the great effort that I put into a 900 level graduate course in
order to learn Sage. After I learn Sage, I would be in a position to
evaluate Sage on the basis of my understanding of Maple. It may or may not
be up to my expectations regarding verifiability. If I accepted the results
as verified then I would need to put in another great amount of effort into
writing a second theoretical paper to be submitted to an international
nuclear journal to determine if that international journal considered Sage
to be verified. In other words I would need to expend one man year of effort
to determine if my investment of time in learning Sage is or is not in vain.
I cannot see that the effort is worth the risk Do you agree?
2
Vladimir Bondarenko
Mathematica.
On May 11, 12:26 pm, "2" <non...@anon.com> wrote:
> "Dave" <f...@coo.com> wrote in messagenews:4827...@212.67.96.135...
>
> [snip]
>
> > Sage 3.0.1 was released a few days ago
>
> >http://www.sagemath.org/
>
> > Why not try that, rather than asking for a pirate copy of Maple? It is
> > legally free. If you have $10, you can buy a book on it from Amazon
>
> >http://www.amazon.com/Sage-Tutorial-www-sagemath-org-William-Stein/dp...
Axel Vogt
A way might be to contact Maple for an academic version.
NB: you are not as anonymous as you wished ... at least
I would use a different provider. IIRC hacked versions
can be found at an eastern site - the problem is, that
you do not know what else comes with that solution.
Additionally it may be a bit strange if being asked to
provide a Maple sheet for your work ...
2
>> If I accepted the results as verified then I would need to put in another
>> great amount of effort into writing a second theoretical paper to be
>> submitted to an international nuclear journal to determine if that
>> international journal considered Sage to be verified.
> Additionally it may be a bit strange if being asked to
> provide a Maple sheet for your work ...
In my experience, being asked for a Maple sheet does not occur. Reviewers
use whatever symbolic math program they like best, Maple, Mathematica or
what ever, for verification. The submitter never knows what tools are being
used for verification. But in my experience, verification is done by
reviewers who find minor small faults or omissions for improvement of the
manuscript. In my experience, it is best to follow submission guidelines and
submit the manuscript in the lingua franca of scientific journals, a
Microsoft Word document. That requires hand translation of Maple results
using Equation Editor, a labour of love. Maybe more automatic tools exist
today. In the event that the reviewers require assistance in verification,
the editor can always ask the submitter for a Maple sheet. I would willingly
submit a Maple sheet with no fear that the journal would require
verification that I paid for my copy of Maple. It is a matter of ethics. You
do not expect a journal to fault you on such a non-scientific issue.
Properly done science is value free, ethically. Likewise, I would no expect
a journal would ask me to submit a blood test to determine if I wrote my
theoretical nuclear paper under the influence of Ritalin, an intelligence
enhancing drug. Paul Erdos wrote 1,700 math papers under the influence of
dextroamphetamine and no one complained that he worked unethically. I don't
know, if Paul Erdos had worked with Maple, maybe he could have published
many more papers in his lifetime. Albert Einstein published only 55 papers
in his lifetime. Maybe if he had access to personal computers during his
lifetime, he could have been much more prolific than he was.
I'm just a beginner and that's just my opinion.
YBM
> In my experience, it is best to follow submission guidelines and
> submit the manuscript in the lingua franca of scientific journals, a
> Microsoft Word document.
Are you kidding ?
Henry Poincare
> In my experience, it is
> best to follow submission guidelines and submit the manuscript in the
> lingua franca of scientific journals, a Microsoft Word document
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Lo and behold, here's the third "village idiot" we've got here. Is that a
world record?
2
Gee, if you found only one thing objectionable in what I just wrote, I guess
I'm not doing badly. I take that as validation of all else that I wrote.
2
William stein
> As far as I understand, right now Sage is (much) weaker than Maple or
> Mathematica.
Have you ever used Sage?
- William
mabshoff
> As far as I understand, right now Sage is (much) weaker than Maple or
> Mathematica.
It depends what you want to do. In general that statement does not
hold. I case you notice the recent blog post on the MMA blog about
"computing the 10 millionth Bernoulli number" - see
It took MMA slightly under six days. Sage via Pari can do the same
computation in about two and a half days on a slightly faster system,
so one should be careful about making general statements. And while we
discussed the issue some people started exploring possibilities to
implement it even faster :)
Not knowing what exactly needs to be computed in this case [physics is
too wide an area to guess] I can only make some general statements:
* symbolic integration/limits and so on: Sage uses Maxima and I would
say the Maple and MMA are stronger there.
* basic polynomial arithmetic, linear algebra: Sage ought to be much
faster and in many cases more memory efficient, but that depends on
the problem in question obviously. The interpreter is certainly much
stronger.
* for specialized work in physics there are people interested in
integrating ROOT and a couple other projects from the world of
physics into Sage [as optional parts it seems]
* Sage also ships numpy/scipy, so there is likely some capabilities
some engineers/physicists can use that is pretty capable
Overall Sage is becoming more useful to people interested in applied
math [i.e. the folks who would ask "What is a ring"] as more and more
people from that field are starting to use Sage and also improve it
there, but we do know that we have to do quite some catching up to do.
The symbolics framework written on our end is getting close to a
useful state and should be merged in the next months or so. But give
us another year and we will see where we stand. Contributions in any
area are certainly welcome :)
Cheers,
Michael
William stein
> On May 11, 9:43 pm, Vladimir Bondarenko <v...@cybertester.com> wrote:
>
> > As far as I understand, right now Sage is (much) weaker than Maple or
> > Mathematica.
>
> It depends what you want to do. In general that statement does not
> hold. I case you notice the recent blog post on the MMA blog about
> "computing the 10 millionth Bernoulli number" - see
>
>
> It took MMA slightly under six days. Sage via Pari can do the same
> computation in about two and a half days on a slightly faster system,
> so one should be careful about making general statements. And while we
> discussed the issue some people started exploring possibilities to
> implement it even faster :)
>
Amusingly, it would take Maple *centuries* to compute
the 10^7th Bernoulli number (the calculation alluded to above).
This is because there's a clever algorithm to compute Bernoulli
numbers that exploits Euler's relation between the Riemann zeta
function and Bernoulli numbers.
$ maple
|\^/| Maple 11 (APPLE UNIVERSAL OSX)
._|\| |/|_. Copyright (c) Maplesoft, a division of Waterloo Maple
Inc. 2007
\ MAPLE / All rights reserved. Maple is a trademark of
<____ ____> Waterloo Maple Inc.
| Type ? for help.
> bernoulli(2000);
bytes used=1320695552, alloc=5110872, time=9.36
-6773763262978740573696... (many more digits).
The same calculation in Mathematica and Sage is nearly instant:
sage: time k = bernoulli(2000)
CPU times: user 0.02 s, sys: 0.00 s, total: 0.02 s
And as the input 2000 is replaced by larger numbers Maple is even
slower and slower compared to the Sage and Mathematica...
Best regards,
William
Vladimir Bondarenko
Are you sure? Consider this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca
On May 11, 2:07 pm, "2" <non...@anon.com> wrote:
> "Axel Vogt" <&nore...@axelvogt.de> wrote
Vladimir Bondarenko
No, as you forgot to mention yourself.
Henry Poincare
>> > In my experience, it is
>> > best to follow submission guidelines and submit the manuscript in the
>> > lingua franca of scientific journals, a Microsoft Word document
>>
>> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>
>> Lo and behold, here's the third "village idiot" we've got here. Is that
>> a world record?
Never mind Bondarenko, no one could steal your records.
Vladimir Bondarenko
Read Basti. Use Maple 12.
One of the Maplesoft signal achievements not to say breakthroughs
is their trail-blazing MTUFHB (Mathematics Totally Unpredictable
For Human Beings).
For example, the outcome of the operation depends on the difference
of temperatures in your room 5 years ago, and that in Washington,
D.C. on May, 12, 2000. Even better!
Now, in contrast to the obsolete (stupid! idiotic!) OLD mathematics
where the results of A and B are independent of each other,
and you can either get B and then A and the results will be
always the same (what a penury of thought and spirit!) - in
Maplesoft's MTUFHB all is much better - and the result of
A depends on if B was calculated before A.
Unique Maplesoft's MTUFHB is implemented in their Maple 12.
Find the details in
Man+Machine Review Of Maple Crisis beta 0.2
http://maple.bug-list.org/maple-crisis.php
coming.
Cheers,
Vladimir Bondarenko
VM and GEMM architect
Co-founder, CEO, Mathematical Director
http://www.cybertester.com/ Cyber Tester, LLC
http://maple.bug-list.org/ Maple Bugs Encyclopaedia
http://www.CAS-testing.org/ CAS Testing
> William- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
Karen Bindash
> "Dave" <f...@coo.com> wrote in messagenews:4827...@212.67.96.135...
>
> [snip]
>
> > Sage 3.0.1 was released a few days ago
>
> >http://www.sagemath.org/
>
> > Why not try that, rather than asking for a pirate copy of Maple? It is
> > legally free. If you have $10, you can buy a book on it from Amazon
>
>
> > There is an online Sage notebook at
>
> >https://www.sagenb.org/
>
> > you need to sign up for an account, but it is free.
>
> Thank you Dave. Let me explain, more. I am interested in doing symbolic math
> that is verifiable and with least effort on my part.
It's hard to imagine how on earth you can verify the results easily on
a closed-source program. You would have far more chance on an open-
source program.
Have you considered comparing Maple and Sage results? That would give
more confidence.
Karen Bindash
>
> [snip]
>
> > Sage 3.0.1 was released a few days ago
>
> >http://www.sagemath.org/
>
> > Why not try that, rather than asking for a pirate copy of Maple? It is
> > legally free. If you have $10, you can buy a book on it from Amazon
>
>
> > There is an online Sage notebook at
>
> >https://www.sagenb.org/
>
> > you need to sign up for an account, but it is free.
>
> Thank you Dave. Let me explain, more. I am interested in doing symbolic math
> that is verifiable and with least effort on my part. I learned Maple in a
> one semester 900 level graduate course. That took a lot of effort. With that
> effort I was able to write one theoretical paper that was published in an
> international nuclear journal. So my effort was not in vain. I've had a
> superficial look at Sage. The problem I see, is that I would need to
> duplicate the great effort that I put into a 900 level graduate course in
> order to learn Sage. After I learn Sage, I would be in a position to
> evaluate Sage on the basis of my understanding of Maple. It may or may not
> be up to my expectations regarding verifiability. If I accepted the results
> as verified then I would need to put in another great amount of effort into
> writing a second theoretical paper to be submitted to an international
> nuclear journal to determine if that international journal considered Sage
> to be verified. In other words I would need to expend one man year of effort
> to determine if my investment of time in learning Sage is or is not in vain.
> I cannot see that the effort is worth the risk Do you agree?
>
> 2
It's hard to imagine how you can verify much with a closed source
program like Maple - especially given the number of bugs that get
reported for it.
Comparing the Maple results with Sage might be useful.
Karen
SzH
>
> It's hard to imagine how on earth you can verify the results easily on
> a closed-source program. You would have far more chance on an open-
> source program.
>
In practice there is little difference. Even if the source code is
accessible, the overwhelming majority of users does not have the
expertise and/or time to read the code and check that the
implementation is correct.
Dave
Agreed, but Karen's point about comparing Maple to Sage is very valid.
That would give me more confidence than simply using Maple. Vladimir
Bondarenko has shown numerous bugs in Maple which don't get fixed.
Vladimir never answered the question from William Stein about whether he
had ever used Sage. It would be interesting to know if Vladimir has. It
would be good if he could turn his bug-spotting software towards Sage -
but hopefully report bugs in a more professional manner than he tends to
do with Maple and Mathematica.
I've never used Sage myself, but have been involved on and off for some
time in helping porting to Solaris - it's not quite there, but I think
will be soon. The developers are quite responsive - more so than I've
found with any commercial software.
Microsoft are financially supporting a native port to Windows - I
believe at the minute, it needs to be run under Cywin if used on a
Windows machine. Personally though, I avoid windows whenever possible,
which is 99.99999999% of the time.
SzH
> Personally though, I avoid windows whenever possible,
> which is 99.99999999% of the time.
Then you would have to live for more than 10 million years to ever
need it ;) Why not just write "never" instead?
Dave
> On May 12, 2:57 pm, Dave <f...@coo.com> wrote:
>> Personally though, I avoid windows whenever possible,
>> which is 99.99999999% of the time.
>
> Then you would have to live for more than 10 million years to ever
> need it ;)
That sounds good!
> Why not just write "never" instead?
>
My main home computer does not have windows installed on it (partially
dictated by the fact it's CPUs are incapable of running Windows) and my
laptop rarely runs Windows. I guess for every 100 times the laptop boots
Solaris, it boots Windows once. So I guess a more accurate figure would
be that I avoid Windows around 99.5% of the time!
So I exaggerated by about 0.5%, which does not sound too bad!
Dave
2
> Vladimir Bondarenko has shown numerous bugs in Maple which don't get
> fixed.
Vladimir Bondarenko is a skilled mathematician who has a keen understanding
of the internals of Maple. It is not so much that he 'discovered' the bugs
but that he _generated_ the bugs. If his objective was to solve some well
defined problem, he would simply reflect on the internal factors that
generated the observed bugs and found a 'work around'. His objective is to
contribute to the evolution of Maple. His criticism is that as Maple evolves
new bugs are created and not fix for years or never. I know the creators of
Maple. They would likely criticize Bondarenko's critique of Maple in the
following terms. They would say, "What's wrong with you? We are in the
business of constantly expanding the domain of application of Maple. Bugs
are universal and most find some kind of work around. The domain of
application of Maple is constantly expanding so it is becoming monotonically
more useful, because of our work. The bugs are just bugs to you, they are
not bugs to everyone."
> Vladimir never answered the question from William Stein about whether he
> had ever used Sage.
Vladimir is skilled with Maple. It would likely take him one man year to
become proficient in Sage to the point where he could generate a similar
critique of Sage. Why should he bother?
par...@domain.invalid
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_computer_algebra_systems
>
> I personally use (and develop for) FriCAS / Axiom. SAGE has already been
> mentioned, Maxima is also well known. As far as I know the others are more
> specialised. (Please correct me if I'm mistaken.)
>
Xcas is not specialised. It is probably the closest (open-source) CAS to
maple (you can for example open mws file -that is old maple worksheet
like maple V.5 - under Xcas and you even have a small chance to be able
to run your worksheet unmodified).
Dave
> "Dave" <f...@coo.com> wrote
>
>> Vladimir Bondarenko has shown numerous bugs in Maple which don't get
>> fixed.
>
> Vladimir Bondarenko is a skilled mathematician who has a keen understanding
> of the internals of Maple. It is not so much that he 'discovered' the bugs
> but that he _generated_ the bugs.
I'm not sure how you can justify that statement. I don't believe he has
generated the bugs, but I do believe some cases at least are probably of
little practical significance.
But you need to take what I say in the context I said it - mainly I was
agreeing with Karen that you can't really verify results too well in
closed source software like Maple.
If two pieces of software developed independently get the same result,
then I would tend to trust that result more than if one piece of
software gave it. Of course, since Sage is open-source software, with
many components been around a very long time, I expect some Maple
developers have looked at some of the Sage code - some might even have
written it.
Hence I don't think the development of Sage and Maple can be considered
totally independent of each other. But getting identical results in the
two pieces of software would certainly give me more confidence than I
could ever get from Maple alone.
> If his objective was to solve some well
> defined problem, he would simply reflect on the internal factors that
> generated the observed bugs and found a 'work around'.
Yes. I've hit several problems over many years with Mathematica on
Solaris and have often found work-arounds for them. (Usually with the
help of Sun employees).
http://www.g8wrb.org/mathematica/
Unlike Vladimir, I don't go around hunting for bugs, but if they crop
up, I would try to find a solution.
> His objective is to
> contribute to the evolution of Maple.
I'm not sure whether that is so. I've never quite understood his
objectives. I've asked him and have never received a good answer.
> His criticism is that as Maple evolves
> new bugs are created and not fix for years or never. I know the creators of
> Maple. They would likely criticize Bondarenko's critique of Maple in the
> following terms. They would say, "What's wrong with you? We are in the
> business of constantly expanding the domain of application of Maple. Bugs
> are universal and most find some kind of work around. The domain of
> application of Maple is constantly expanding so it is becoming monotonically
> more useful, because of our work. The bugs are just bugs to you, they are
> not bugs to everyone."
Finding workarounds is ok *if* you know there is a bug. But if software
gives an incorrect result, which looks reasonable, you often will not
look for a workaround as you will not realise there is a problem.
I suspect a lot of the bugs Vladimir finds are probably not likely to be
met by users in general use, but clearly some are.
>> Vladimir never answered the question from William Stein about whether he
>> had ever used Sage.
>
> Vladimir is skilled with Maple. It would likely take him one man year to
> become proficient in Sage to the point where he could generate a similar
> critique of Sage. Why should he bother?
I've never quite understood Vladimir's objectives. If his objective is
to make money from selling his skills, he definitely goes about it the
wrong way. Hence I can't really answer why he might bother turning to
Sage, since I don't know his objectives.
*Personally*, (and I'm not Vladamir) I would get some satisfaction from
finding bugs in Sage and finding fixes for them. But I'm quite keen on
open-source software, and have developed several pieces over the years
http://atlc.sourceforge.net/
http://witm.sourceforge.net/
http://chessdb.sourceforge.net/
Only last week I found a bug in part of Sage which prevented it
compiling on Solaris. I found a workaround (simple as changing '==' for
'=' in a script), and I know that bug will be fixed in the next release
(3.0.2). Having access to the source code of open-source software, it is
generally much easier to really get to the bottom of why a bug occurs.
I'm sure finding bugs in Sage, then finding fixes for them, would be
more useful to humanity than endless rants about Maple to a huge number
of irrelevant newsgroups.
Vladamir is often setting challenges for others (e.g. An exact
simplification challenge ....). So perhaps he might like to challenge
himself and turn his skills to improving open-source software. Done
properly, I'm sure he could be of benefit to the open-source community.
But he needs to change his methods considerably.
Peter Pein
> ... to determine if that international journal considered Sage
> to be verified. ...
Do you want to imply: there exists a CAS xyz with the property: "xyz is
considerd to be verified" ?
LOL,
Peter
2
No I do not. I have no idea if reviewers for international journals consider
any computer algebra system to be verified. The only knowledge that I can
offer is that reviewers of one nuclear journal have access to, and use some
kinds of CAS ( I do not know what they use). I base this knowledge on my
observation that they have the ability to take mathematical expressions
provided to them in print form (or in Equation Editor MS Word documents) and
check and improve upon them. Given the difficulty in computation this likely
was done by using some CAS that they consider trustworthy.
I may have misspoken above so let me expand. I specifically cited Maple in
my list of references in my submission. The amount of CPU time that I
expended on Maple symbolic manipulation in my work amounted to several weeks
of CPU time in aggregate. After much travail I obtained simplification that
were meaningful. I do not think the reviewers would have put that amount of
effort into verifying the final results. They verified my own
trustworthiness and given that Maple was cited and provided meaningful
simplifications they decided that the results were sufficiently trustworthy
to convey to readers.
I consider Maple to be verified as far as my own work is concerned. My
experience with one scientific journal suggests that they consider Maple to
be verified as far as my own work is concerned. I have no idea if this would
work with Sage but you are welcome to try.
2
Dave
> I consider Maple to be verified as far as my own work is concerned. My
> experience with one scientific journal suggests that they consider Maple to
> be verified as far as my own work is concerned. I have no idea if this would
> work with Sage but you are welcome to try.
>
> 2
I think from what you say, both you and the reviewers have a high
confidence that Maple is giving correct results. I don't believe you
should claim the results have been verified simply on the basis Maple
gave them.
An online dictionary:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/verified
give a definition for verified:
1) To prove the truth of by presentation of evidence or testimony;
substantiate.
2) To determine or test the truth or accuracy of, as by comparison,
investigation, or reference: experiments that verified the hypothesis.
The second definition says "To determine or test the truth or accuracy
of, as by comparison". I think comparing to Sage would be reasonable
verification.
2
> I think comparing to Sage would be reasonable verification.
Certainly, what you say is correct, but to what extent has Sage penetrated
the marketplace compared to Maple or Mathematica (or muMath which I also
learned, or its successor Derive)? I may have been done a disservice. I
expended consider effort in mastering Maple. I paid tuition. I was taught by
the creators (of Maple). Yet Maple is a commercial product that I cannot
afford because of my lifestyle. Nor do I have an entitlement. I am tapped
out when it comes to learning new stuff. And I cannot learn unless I have
faith of efficacy. Hence, it is simpler for me to steal a copy of Maple than
it is to learn Sage or any other CAS that is free or relatively cheap.
I have no criticism to offer regarding Sage. Commercial success is a
struggle, as is scholarship. I wish Sage the best of luck in the
marketplace.
2
Dave
> "Dave" <f...@coo.com> wrote
>
>> I think comparing to Sage would be reasonable verification.
>
> Certainly, what you say is correct, but to what extent has Sage penetrated
> the marketplace compared to Maple or Mathematica (or muMath which I also
> learned, or its successor Derive)?
It's hard to see how you can use the word 'marketplace' when Sage is free.
I've no idea of the relative number of users of Sage vs Maple or
Mathematica. I suspect estimates of usage of Mathematica must be very
very rough estimates, as so many colleges have site licenses. In those
cases, the number of users is a small fraction of the number licensed to
use it. And its hard to see how Wolfram can know how many actually use a
product.
> I may have been done a disservice. I
> expended consider effort in mastering Maple. I paid tuition. I was taught by
> the creators (of Maple). Yet Maple is a commercial product that I cannot
> afford because of my lifestyle. Nor do I have an entitlement. I am tapped
> out when it comes to learning new stuff. And I cannot learn unless I have
> faith of efficacy. Hence, it is simpler for me to steal a copy of Maple than
> it is to learn Sage or any other CAS that is free or relatively cheap.
The fact companies such as Google and Microsoft are supporting Sage
suggests to me that you should give it serious consideration. One
assumes those companies have faith in the software.
The fact you can't afford Maple, and there is a free alternative, would
suggest to me you have better reasons than most for trying it. Sage is
based on Python, which is in itself a language well worth learning.
I've not used it myself, and I will not until there is a port to
Solaris, but I am trying to help the Solaris port.
William stein
> SzH wrote:
> > On May 12, 1:57 pm, Karen Bindash <KarenBind...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> >> It's hard to imagine how on earth you can verify the results easily on
> >> a closed-source program. You would have far more chance on an open-
> >> source program.
>
> > In practice there is little difference. Even if the source code is
> > accessible, the overwhelming majority of users does not have the
> > expertise and/or time to read the code and check that the
> > implementation is correct.
>
> Agreed, but Karen's point about comparing Maple to Sage is very valid.
> That would give me more confidence than simply using Maple. Vladimir
> Bondarenko has shown numerous bugs in Maple which don't get fixed.
>
> Vladimir never answered the question from William Stein about whether he
> had ever used Sage. It would be interesting to know if Vladimir has. It
> would be good if he could turn his bug-spotting software towards Sage -
> but hopefully report bugs in a more professional manner than he tends to
> do with Maple and Mathematica.
I think Vladimir's testing system assumes the program being tested
runs natively under Windows. Thus I suspect he won't use Sage until
we have a full native port to Windows. This is not easy, but we're
hard at work on it, especially thanks to financial support from
Microsoft Research.
> I've never used Sage myself, but have been involved on and off for some
> time in helping porting to Solaris - it's not quite there, but I think
> will be soon. The developers are quite responsive - more so than I've
> found with any commercial software.
>
> Microsoft are financially supporting a native port to Windows - I
> believe at the minute, it needs to be run under Cywin if used on a
> Windows machine. Personally though, I avoid windows whenever possible,
> which is 99.99999999% of the time.
Actually we do not even support Sage on Cygwin right now (though we
used to).
The way most people run Sage under Windows is that they download and
install
a custom Linux VMware virtual machine with Sage preinstalled. When
they run this virtual machine it starts a local web server,
and the user then uses Internet Explorer or Firefox or Opera
(locally)
to interact with Sage. Alternatively they ssh into the virtual
machine for
console access. I'm well aware that this is clumsy, but it
fortunately works.
Obviously we want a full native port that doesn't use Cygwin (much).
-- William
William stein
> 2 wrote:
> > "Dave" <f...@coo.com> wrote
>
> >> I think comparing to Sage would be reasonable verification.
>
> > Certainly, what you say is correct, but to what extent has Sage penetrated
> > the marketplace compared to Maple or Mathematica (or muMath which I also
> > learned, or its successor Derive)?
>
> It's hard to see how you can use the word 'marketplace' when Sage is free.
>
> I've no idea of the relative number of users of Sage vs Maple or
[Disclaimer: I started the Sage project.]
I do. There's probably about 100 times as many Maple/Mathematica
users as Sage users. That said, Sage fits nicely into the Python
"ecosystem", and Python probably has an order of magnitude
more users than Maple/Mathematica.
DETAILS:
The Maple and Mathematica websites estimate around 1 million
"users" each for their software. This is roughly consistent
with the yearly revenue they must take in to support their staff.
I estimate that Sage has maybe 10,000 users based on weekly download
figures, mailing list memberships, etc. (for example sage-support)
has 503 members. Also, when we won the trophees du libre in November
last year there were 10,000 downloads of Sage in one weekend, so
many people have tried Sage.
Sage still has a very small niche of users compared to
Maple/Mathematica. A full native Microsoft Windows port
is critical to changing this. Also, it takes time -- it was
exactly one year ago that the first serious native
symbolic calculus functionality was added to Sage. Before
then, Sage was functionality-wise much more targeted at
numerical and exact linear algebra, coding theory, cryptography,
group theory, abstract algebra, combinatorics, and graph theory,
which are all extremely interesting and important areas, but
probably don't yields millions of users (well, numerical linear
algebra might).
>
> > I may have been done a disservice. I
> > expended consider effort in mastering Maple. I paid tuition. I was taught by
> > the creators (of Maple). Yet Maple is a commercial product that I cannot
> > afford because of my lifestyle. Nor do I have an entitlement. I am tapped
> > out when it comes to learning new stuff. And I cannot learn unless I have
> > faith of efficacy. Hence, it is simpler for me to steal a copy of Maple than
> > it is to learn Sage or any other CAS that is free or relatively cheap.
It's perhaps too late for you. I started the
Sage project is so that there will be
less people who end up in your unfortunate situation.
I understand you, since I was in much the same situation
(w.r.t. Magma instead of Maple) four years ago. To get
out, I didn't just have to "learn Sage", I had to write a
big chunk of it, build a community, spend massive time writing
grant proposals, etc... and this is only the beginning. It's
a huge gamble on my part. I wish the previous generation had
already done this (like with R and statistics), but they
haven't in mathematics. So it's up to us.
> The fact companies such as Google and Microsoft are supporting Sage
> suggests to me that you should give it serious consideration. One
> assumes those companies have faith in the software.
Google really likes Python and tools like Sage that improve
it's potential. Microsoft Research has people doing research
that find the unique functionality of Sage (in those non-calculus
areas mentioned above) *extremely* valuable to their research.
That said, I do not think they "trust" Sage. *I* do
not trust Sage. Anybody who blindly trusts any complicated
mathematical software system is being foolish. It's critically
important to come up with as many double checks on computations
as you can, to be skeptical of any results, to compare
computations done in one system with those in another, etc.
A major reason that Sage has native support for interfacing
with Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, Magma, Octave, etc., and
converting objects to and from those systems is so that people
can do calculations both in Sage and another system and easily
compare the results.
That said, at least with open source software you can look
at and read any random part of the full source code. One
advantage of this is that it will probably *reduce* your blind
trust in the software. That's a good thing.
> The fact you can't afford Maple, and there is a free alternative, would
> suggest to me you have better reasons than most for trying it. Sage is
> based on Python, which is in itself a language well worth learning.
I definitely agree that that person should try Sage. Everybody
should.
Try it out. If you don't like it for a number of reasons,
TELL ME (wst...@gmail.com)!
I really want to know! I might not be able to do anything now
about the problems that keep Sage from being adopted, but I definitely
can't do anything if I don't know about them.
> I've not used it myself, and I will not until there is a port to
> Solaris, but I am trying to help the Solaris port.
Thanks. There absolutely will be a Solaris port. We care deeply
about
supporting that OS.
> > I have no criticism to offer regarding Sage. Commercial success is a
> > struggle, as is scholarship. I wish Sage the best of luck in the
> > marketplace.
Thanks.
By the way, regarding Vladimir's motivations for testing
CAS's, I speculate that he is disturbed by people blindly trusting
Maple (and other math software), so
he wants to emphasize that they should not do that.
I suspect this, because in his writings he describes
vivid images of "bad things" happening as a result of
people trusting math software when they shouldn't.
He also quotes repeatedly from the Maple marketing
literature which often states quite forcefully that
one should trust Maple. The Sage marketing machine,
as it is, does not work like that.
Two days ago I read through his 300-ish page pdf about
Maple's flaws. Some of the flaws are actually quite
interesting. For example, he points out that typing
(2^4000)!
into Maple *crashes* Maple immediately. I tried
that with Maple 11's command line and sure enough on the
system completely crashes (not just a memory
error but a total crash):
D-69-91-159-111:~ was$ maple
|\^/| Maple 11 (APPLE UNIVERSAL OSX)
._|\| |/|_. Copyright (c) Maplesoft, a division of Waterloo Maple
Inc. 2007
\ MAPLE / All rights reserved. Maple is a trademark of
<____ ____> Waterloo Maple Inc.
| Type ? for help.
> (2^4000)!;
bytes used=4000572, alloc=3865916, time=0.04
Execution stopped: Stack limit reached.
D-69-91-159-111:~ was$
In the GUI interface, the same input causes Maple
to run very slowly for several *minutes* then finally
the maple kernel crashes. He evidently has reported
this issue to Maple for over 5 years. This is exactly
the sort of bug that if somebody reported it to the Sage
list it would instantly appear as a blocker in our
public bug list:
http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac
for all to see. And it would get fixed.
In fact, we *did* have almost exactly the same bug,
which two years ago a high school student found and
reported, and which I fixed the next day.
-- William
http://www.sagemath.org
rjf
It seems to me that the closest free system to Maple would be Maxima.
There are facilities in other systems not in Maple or Maxima, but I
doubt that
the original poster was asking for the kinds of number theory
facilities in SAGE.
There clearly IS a marketplace (of ideas, programs, personnel) of free
software and even free CAS.
That is why some people refuse to mention Maxima or Axiom or ... when
discussing programs, because
they cannot then portray their own programs as the sole free CAS
competing with Maple and Mathematica.
As for getting a pirate copy of Maple,
1. it is logically possible for this to happen, but it seems kind of
moronic to have this discussion on a public newsgroup to which answers
could lead to prosecution.
2. Legally speaking, there is, as far as I know, no basis for
violating the property ownership rights of Maplesoft. If one posits
as a general position that there are no property rights for
intellectual property, I would like to stop paying for copies
(virtual) of books, movies, records; I would like to get major
discounts on drugs (by virtue of not paying patent holders).
3. And if the original poster is really talking not about intellectual
but physical (e.g. free beer rather than free speech), I suggest he
take his arguments elsewhere, and start demanding (say) free beer,
free gasoline etc.
More specifically for Maple,
4. if the original poster needs a copy of Maple for school work, it
should be available from the school, free or at nominal cost.
5. if the original poster has a case to make that he/she needs a copy
for some reason and can't afford it, he/she should write to the Maple
people.
Maybe we can discuss symbolic math in this newsgroup for a while,
instead of essentially off topic material?
4.
par...@domain.invalid
> This thread has wandered pretty far from the original question.
>
> It seems to me that the closest free system to Maple would be Maxima.
>
It seems to me you are wrong :-) since Xcas is much closer to Maple than
Maxima as I stated above.
rjf
I have not tried Xcas. However, being based on Axiom, I would expect
that it would be an interpreter front end to the Axiom system which in
turn is (roughly speaking) a kind of strongly-typed CAS. With this
underneath the covers, I would expect it to be substantially different
from Maple, which comes from a heritage of an untyped CAS.
Reading a maple worksheet would seem to imply compatibility, and maybe
it is, but...
Judging similarity by the surface syntax of a system is not
necessarily so useful. MockMMA is, so far as I know, identical in
syntax to Mathematica version 3.0. It can even run some programs the
same way. However, it is far from implementing all of Mathematica.
Indeed the point of the design was to allow for the running of
Mathematica programs but with a better semantics associated with the
function names, including different algorithms for high-precision
floats.
William stein
> On May 14, 7:35 am, pari...@domain.invalid wrote:
>
> > rjf wrote:
> > > This thread has wandered pretty far from the original question.
>
> > > It seems to me that the closest free system to Maple would be Maxima.
>
> > It seems to me you are wrong :-) since Xcas is much closer to Maple than
> > Maxima as I stated above.
>
> I have not tried Xcas. However, being based on Axiom, I would expect
> that it would be an interpreter front end to the Axiom system which in
> turn is (roughly speaking) a kind of strongly-typed CAS. With this
Except for having an "X" in common in their names, why do you assume
that Xcas is based on Axiom?
-- William
Gabriel Dos Reis
Richard J. Fateman
Apologies. I was mistaken in confusing FriCAS (which is based on Axiom)
and XCAS. They both match the pattern *CAS.
In partial penance for my error, I downloaded xcas to my windows XP
machine and found that it provides a menu which includes frxcas.
This matches fricas with the single-letter substitution i<-->x.
Unfortunately, I could not run any of the versions of xcas.
I tried to run it in some console command window so I could view the
error message which flashed on the screen, but failed on that, too.
This may have to do with some firewall or other configuration issue.
It would, however, surprise me if xcas had the semantics of Maple (say,
for example, all of its knowledge of integration, hypergeometric
functions, simplification).
The descriptions in the documentation are rather vague. I do not know if
this is because the same description is supposed to cover all the
versions of xcas, or some other reason. Some versions of xcas run in
hand-held calculators.
Dave
> This thread has wandered pretty far from the original question.
True, and for very good reason. Originally it was totally inapproiate,
but I hoped my suggested to use a free open-source tool was at leasat
helpful.
> As for getting a pirate copy of Maple,
>
> 1. it is logically possible for this to happen, but it seems kind of
> moronic to have this discussion on a public newsgroup to which answers
> could lead to prosecution.
Which is probably one reason nobody suggested any method of getting a
pirate copy.
> Maybe we can discuss symbolic math in this newsgroup for a while,
> instead of essentially off topic material?
>
> 4.
I would have thought the thread was closer to symbolic math than many
threads on here. In terms on signal to noise ratio, this is one of the
poorest newsgroups I ever use.
G. A. Edgar
<fat...@eecs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Unfortunately, I could not run any of the versions of xcas.
It runs fine on my Mac.
> The descriptions in the documentation are rather vague.
In saying this, do you include the French documentation, or only the
limited English documentation?
--
G. A. Edgar http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~edgar/
par...@domain.invalid
>
> I tried to run it in some console command window so I could view the
> error message which flashed on the screen, but failed on that, too.
>
What is your OS? I have tested xcas successfully on all flavours of
linux, on mac os x.4 and x.5 (be sure to run the Xcas.app, since the
localized versions work only under os x.4), on windows 98, me, xp, xp
pro and vista. Your post would indicate windows. If that is correct, did
you install it in a custom directory or the default (c:\xcas)? Do you
have cygwin installed on your system (they might interfere)?
> This may have to do with some firewall or other configuration issue. It
> would, however, surprise me if xcas had the semantics of Maple (say, for
> example, all of its knowledge of integration, hypergeometric functions,
> simplification).
>
Of course, Xcas does not have all the features of Maple for integration,
etc. since it is 8 years old compared to more than 20, but I believe it
begins to be a credible alternative for many users. On the other hand,
it gives for example access to all arithmetic functions of PARI (except
on mac os x)... Features like, it certainly holds the comparison with
Maxima. My claim that it was the closest open-source CAS to maple is
supported by the fact that you can work with maple (5, 6, 7) syntax
inside Xcas, which should ease the path to people who have learned maple.
rjf
....
>
> Of course, Xcas does not have all the features of Maple for integration,
> etc. since it is 8 years old compared to more than 20, but I believe it
> begins to be a credible alternative for many users. On the other hand,
> it gives for example access to all arithmetic functions of PARI (except
> on mac os x)... Features like, it certainly holds the comparison with
> Maxima. My claim that it was the closest open-source CAS to maple is
> supported by the fact that you can work with maple (5, 6, 7) syntax
> inside Xcas, which should ease the path to people who have learned maple.
I was able to run xcas on a different machine. Here's an example
where Maxima and Maple are closer than Xcas and Maple.
Maxima and Maple both accept the command
integrate(x^2*erf(x),x);
and they each give a correct integral.
Xcas also accepts that command.
But it just returns the unevaluated integral.
I assume there are many similar kinds of examples.
But now that I have a working copy of Xcas, I can appreciate how
different it is from Axiom.
RJF
Bernard Parisse
> I was able to run xcas on a different machine. Here's an example
> where Maxima and Maple are closer than Xcas and Maple.
>
> Maxima and Maple both accept the command
>
> integrate(x^2*erf(x),x);
>
> and they each give a correct integral.
>
> Xcas also accepts that command.
> But it just returns the unevaluated integral.
>
> I assume there are many similar kinds of examples.
>
Of course, as there are other kinds of example where you get an answer
with Xcas and Maple and not with Maxima, or with Xcas but nor Maple nor
Maxima, etc., e.g.
int(1/(sin(x)+3)*1/(x^2+1),x=-infinity..+infinity);
Note that you can help Xcas on your example
tmp:=ibpdv(x^2*erf(x),x^3/3);
ibpdv(tmp,0);
You can not evaluate a CAS just with a few examples. You must do many
tests on different areas before you can decide if it can be used as an
alternative to your favorite (closed-source) system.