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The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]

• ianai 10y ago
  Just make sure to add in some DoD specific modules and I think you've got a winner.
  • williamstein 10y ago
    DoD is the only organization that is currently providing me with grant funding... (and not much). Microsoft also donated some money to Sage this week! And of course there is Google Summer of Code, which is sponsoring many students to work on Sage this summer. [Edit: Added Microsoft/Google.]
    • ianai 10y ago
      I'm not familiar enough, but is there any path for you make it more marketable with things like: -some sort of iOS/android app -somehow tying in computing modularization? I'm thinking like tensorflow or other such things -picking off modeling tasks as use-cases. I get this from my step dad whose lab work has been in modeling..well, this: http://esd1.lbl.gov/research/projects/ascem/ http://esd1.lbl.gov/research/projects/ascem/
• hypeibole 10y ago
  For other people confused about the meaning of BP in this context, it means Benjamin Pierce Fellow. It appears this talk was given in the context of the Benjamin Pierce Centennial Conference: http://www.math.harvard.edu/conferences/bp/ http://www.math.harvard.edu/conferences/bp/
  • catnaroek 10y ago
    Peirce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Peirce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Peirce. Not to be confused with Pierce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_C._Pierce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_C._Pierce.
    • matt4077 10y ago
      Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin_Pierce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin_Pierce, my other childhood role model. No, I wasn't too popular :)
  • williamstein 10y ago
    Yes, exactly. And I haven't given the talk yet! I'm giving it 2 hours from right now, and I'm pretty nervous.
    • acidflask 10y ago
      I'll be there for moral support, if I'm allowed to crash!
      • williamstein 10y ago
        Please come!
    • cossatot 10y ago
      Well you've got a lot of respect from this community, as well as a good bit of understanding of the limitations inherent in academia. Best of luck!
    • travisoliphant 10y ago
      Good luck, William. You have my full support! Thank you for all the great work on Sage and associated tools!
    • math_and_stuff 10y ago
      You have my support as well!
    • apeace 10y ago
      Your company is going to be a huge success. You're clearly passionate about this software. And now you'll be driven by the need to feed yourself :) Congratulations!
    • ddumas 10y ago
      It's an exciting thing to announce, and I'm sure it will go well. Best of luck.
    • niels_olson 10y ago
      Best of luck with the talk! I'm way out in the hinterlands of your world but it struck me how small this world may be: as an MD doing some applied ML stuff out in San Diego I have actually troubleshot a bug with Fernando Perez, and know a few other folks from the early days of what became Jupyter. May you have fair winds and following seas.
• aerioux 10y ago
  Question: why would anyone Sage > Magma (even though it's now a company. i.e. since there already is a clear and ahead forerunner?)
  • cottonseed 10y ago
    Magma is closed-source.
    • acidflask 10y ago
      See Slide 4 for why it's important to be open source. TL;DR: Researcher A finds things he wants improved in Magma (closed source) but can't. Researcher B tries to write improved FOSS implementation, but lost his job, likely in part by spending too much time writing said code and not doing other things like writing papers. Researcher A moves on and has a successful academic career. Moral: writing FOSS can cost you your academic job; it's safer to find something else to do.
    • jasonmorton 10y ago
      Right - would you rather rely on a theorem which the author claimed is true, but won't let you see the proof, or one where the proof is published and reviewed? That's the choice between closed and open source math software.
  • williamstein 10y ago
    The programming language of Sage is Python, which is a better overall language than the custom math-only language of Magma. Also, there are over 80K packages for Python on Pypi compared to a handful of packages for Magma. Ecosystems...
  • wbl 10y ago
    I currently use Magma in my research. I have run into a crash bug I cannot fix or debug, holding up an element of my thesis work. A lot of effort has gone into working around Magma limitations, which Sage doesn't have because it is sanely designed. If you've never had to use Magma, consider yourself lucky.
• et2o 10y ago
  Why did he have to leave academia to start a company if he has tenure?
  • acidflask 10y ago
    As Stein explains in the slides: because he couldn't sustainably pay people to work with him on SAGE, and there is only so much you can do alone.
    • et2o 10y ago
      But you can be a professor and also start a company simultaneously
      • Vivtek 10y ago
        But you can't be a professor and work full-time on another project, which is what he wants to do.
        • et2o 10y ago
          He has a higher risk tolerance than me. I would work on this 80% and do the 20% required stuff as a tenured professor, but what do I know. Maybe I am overly enamored with becoming a tenured professor. If he was already spending his time as a professor working on this, I don't understand the difference. Still, all the best and good luck to him.
          • williamstein 10y ago
            The work of a tenured professor is more than 20% time. A normal teaching load is 4-5 classes a year, plus significant committee work, student advising, etc. It takes an enormous amount of time. And it can be awesome, fun, and many of my colleagues love doing it. But it doesn't result in creating a free open source alternative to Mathematica.
            • 10y ago
• chestervonwinch 10y ago
  What is the difference between running sage math vs ipython / jupyter and importing all the relevant mathematical packages?
  • sdenton4 10y ago
    There's a lot more stuff in sage, like good support for graph theory and group theory, which iPython doesn't even touch. It also wraps a number of other pieces of excellent open source projects.
    • chestervonwinch 10y ago
      I see. I've always thought of sage as ipython+sympy+numpy+matplotlib+scipy ... sort of an enthought type of deal.
      • hasch 10y ago
        sagemath is such a distribution, but also a rather thick layer of algorithms on top of that. many of them are actually written in cython, to make them fast and to have a good binding with those libraries, etc.
        • mseri 10y ago
          Also a syntax pre-parser to support more "standard" mathematical notation (one among the many: exponentiation using ^)
  • hasch 10y ago
    almost none, because sagemath more or less switched to use jupyter as its graphical notebook interface. technically, there is a small preparser (for a little bit of syntax sugar on top of python) and some deeper integration of the plotting capabilities.
    • williamstein 10y ago
• maweki 10y ago
  The problem with Sage, while it's an amazing piece of software, that it is abysmally documented. As is maxima. Sure, there's an example on how to do integration and anything on a high-school level but every time I wanted to do something a little bit more complex, I was completely lost. I found the Mathematica documentation to be miles ahead.
  • acidflask 10y ago
    And the problem with academic funding is that it's really hard to pay people to improve the documentation with those funds.
  • williamstein 10y ago
    You are of course completely right. Almost everybody who works on Sage does so as part of some research mathematics project, often in their spare time, and they just don't have time do the massive amount of work to bring the documentation to the same level of user friendliness as Mathematica. I hope SageMath, Inc. will be able to makes strides to improve documentation for open source math software. Also, this by Greg Bard is a bright spot: http://www.gregorybard.com/Sage.html http://www.gregorybard.com/Sage.html
    • zhte415 10y ago
      A quick fix for this would be recording screen while working on something. And promote work you're doing in the process.
• dharmon 10y ago
  This story reminds me of Prof. Tim Davis of Texas A&M, formerly Florida, who I heard had a hard time getting tenure, after making the software and mathematical world a much better place. He (and his group) developed CHOLMOD and UMFPACK and other sparse solvers used everywhere. Basically, when you type A/b in Matlab, it calls his code. It was an incredibly challenging task going from sort-of/kind-of being able to solve linear systems to where we are today. Hardly anybody thinks about it. Again, you just type A/b, even when A is poorly conditioned. You can write a crappy solver in less than 100 lines of code, but if you read his papers, building a rock-solid solver was a very difficult task. Unfortunately this kind of work is important, but pretty thankless.
  • math_and_stuff 10y ago
    Duff (who was Davis's post-doc advisor IIRC) also deserves credit for MA57, which is used in MATLAB's sparse symmetric indefinite solvers [1]. And the giant BLAS and LAPACK crew (as well as the previous LINPACK authors) deserve some credit for dense systems. [1] http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/ldl.html?requestedDomain=www.mathworks.com http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/ldl.html?requestedD...
    • dharmon 10y ago
      You're right, of course, and the two little words "his group" don't do justice to the army of PhD, masters, and undergraduate students who spent their time on this massive codebase. But in this case, and in the context of the OP, it was Davis's oversight and possibly tangible sacrifices (I don't know the details of his career) that made it possible. Each time we use some numerical methods and it Just Works, we should mumble a tiny prayer of thanks to folks like these, and the writers of BLAS, LAPACK, ARPACK, and many others that provide the backbone of an incredible amount of work.
      • x0x0 10y ago
        I heard (and hope it's true!) Prof Davis got a well-deserved license fee from MathWorks... Prof Doug Lea at Oswego is another unsung hero who has done a ton for programming and particularly parallel programming. A big chunk of java's std library is copyright Josh Bloch and Doug Lea. In particular, Prof Lea built jsr166.
• crb002 10y ago
  Congrats. I have mixed feelings about Sage. I regularly shell out to Python for many of the underlying libraries, but I rarely use the Sage GUI.
• arghbleargh 10y ago
  Wait, so will Sage still be open source?
  • williamstein 10y ago
    Absolutely YES. Sage is and will always be 100% open source. To ensure this, the GPL copyright is spread amongst over 500 people. Also, the software written by the company SageMath, Inc. is also completely open source (https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc).
    • dorfsmay 10y ago
      This is great! What will be the source of revenue? Dual-license? Support?
      • williamstein 10y ago
        It's explained here. Sage itself is 100% open source, but we have a cloud hosted environment people can pay (a very reasonable amount) to use. https://cloud.sagemath.com/policies/pricing.html https://cloud.sagemath.com/policies/pricing.html
        • tamana 10y ago
          Please charge an unreasonable amount, to secure a good source of funding for your work.
          • csense 10y ago
            This. $200 for 4 months for 25 users works out to $2 a month per user. You could double or triple it and still be less than the personal plan. Those large multiuser plans probably come out of grants, departmental budgets, etc. So they're likely not all that sensitive to price. Pretend you were still in academia, and had found online some great cloud-hosted software you wanted to use in a course, would it change your / your department's decision about purchasing that software if covering 70 students for a semester cost $400 vs $800 vs $1000?
• phamilton 10y ago
  William and I both presented at a RethinkDB meetup this last fall (SageMathCloud leverages RethinkDB changefeeds in awesome ways) and I got to talk to him a bit about some of these frustrations. It really is a rough spot to be in and I wish him all the best.
  • williamstein 10y ago
    Every time a user types anything into any document in SageMathCloud, RethinkDB changes propagate those changes to all other users of the document. We use RethinkDB heavily at all levels of SageMathCloud.
• bluenose69 10y ago
  Setting up a company can help because it will let other researchers support the project by buying the software on research grants. A grant can also pay for consultant-style improvements to software. It doesn't really matter if the software is also being given away for free. The important thing is to have an invoice to give to the university financial services staff. I'd prefer it if the granting agencies supported this sort of software infrastructure directly, but, lacking that, a company is a way to hire people to tackle some of the weaknesses of Sage, whether they be in its core functionality or its UI.
  • williamstein 10y ago
    "Setting up a company can help because it will let other researchers support the project by buying the software on research grants." This is absolutely correct, and has happened many times now in the last few months (I started the company itself a year ago).
    • peterarmstrong 10y ago
      By the way, another way to get financial support for an open source project is to sell a short tutorial book. For example, the creator of Laravel did this on Leanpub (disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Leanpub) and did pretty well: https://leanpub.com/laravel https://leanpub.com/laravel is #7 in lifetime earnings on Leanpub. (Also, one of the core contributors on Laravel has done even better: https://leanpub.com/codebright https://leanpub.com/codebright is #2 in lifetime earnings on Leanpub.) Similarly, the creator of Trailblazer is doing pretty well recently with his Leanpub book: https://leanpub.com/trailblazer https://leanpub.com/trailblazer is #9 in revenue over the past week. Anyway, my point is that even if you're in a niche, if you are the clear expert in that niche (say if you created the framework, or in your case, the software), then a book may be one worthwhile component of a monetization strategy. If you can sell a $30 book to 4000 people, you can earn some decent money. (The royalties on a $30 book on Leanpub are $26.50, so multiplying by 4000 results in over $100K.)
      • ianai 10y ago
• fsloth 10y ago
  Does make sense - academia is about theory, businesses are part of implementing end user solutions. most of academia runs on a tech stack delivered by commercial entities anyway. Building products is not as much about creativity as delivering a fixed product with a service plan and support chain in addition to product development. Companies have various operations to create full fledged products - academia can supply only the r&d part. And this is a good divisionoflabour, IMO.
  • williamstein 10y ago
    I have come to the same conclusion, despite a decade of wishful thinking in the opposite direction. That said, companies can do a much, much better job of working together with academia, and I hope SageMath, Inc. does.
    • porFavor 10y ago
      Nooooooooooooooooooo! I mean, yes. But, also no. Prof. Stein, You do not know me, but you have been an inpiration to me. I came across several of your books during a year of post-bac study. They spoke to me, especially "Algebraic Number Theory, a Computational Approach". They also steered me toward your home page, and your work on Sage Math. I thought to myself, "yes. yes!" Though I'm not punk as fuck, I'm definitely a 'walk to your own drum beat' believer, and a skateboarding professor that heads an open source project taking on Mathematica would make an awesome lodestar. I was 32 when I quit a great job at a very well know Wall Street investment firm (back-office, not master-of-the-universe stuff, but definitely a good place to be) so that I could study nothing but math for a year. I should point out, my math grades up to this point were: - D in my senior year in high school - C in the only undergrad math course I had to take So, everyone was like, "You're effin crazy, what the eff are you doing, you're making an effin bad decision..." Etc. Well, it was the best decision I ever made. Two weeks after leaving my job I was in a dorm room with an 18 year old football player (very, very awkward), but a year later I was a class or two away from a degree in math. My wife and I decided to add moving (again), wedding planning, and another thing to our life, so I didn't quite finish a degree. I received a bunch of As and a few Bs. It was a miracle. (No, it was a lot of hard work, and having seen the light which is the beauty of mathematics). I've thought many, many, many long hours about the issues of open source development and how it might be made sustainable. I've had to, as it relates intimately to the reason I left my job and went off on this new path. I've got a couple ideas that I believe are very realistically workable. In short, the first go I'll be making at one of these ideas is, software is developed by a community which then makes the source code open source but not compiled into programs, and with no beautify logos or easy to use UIs. They then copy right that code for a month and charge non-members a small (think Spotify) amount to have access to the compiled, bundled, UI'ified versions that are encrypted with a monthly key. Then, at the end of the month, that software is all marked as "old", put in the public domain, and the keys are "unlocked". If the software is useful, the price is right, and the user is not a programmer, then they'll hopefully pay $10 or $15 a month even though they could use last months software for free. Also like Spotify, paying this fee would gain a user access to all the communities software. The subscription fees will be allocated to programmers who will be paid to work on software per rata according to some weighted combo of votes from users and votes by community members. Community members are, of course, free to work on whatever they'd like to in addition to that. Community members receive a payout from the subscription, basically whatever subscription revenue there is minus that paid out for paid development (per previous mentioned mechanism) minus operating expenses. You can only have your software in that "repository" if you are a member, and you must buy in to be a member, sorta like a co-op. So, that was a very sloppy explanation, but hopefully you get the general points. My main point however, is, please don't go corporate. Even companies like Patagonia, though it is a "B-Corportation" for the public benefit, are clearly driven by the bottom line. How else could one explain why they charge $35 for 40 different types of hats. We don't need 40 different types of hats. But, it drives their bottom line, so that's what we get (albeit, in addition to the great things they also do). "You know what I hate about f*cking banking? It reduces people to numbers..." You know, the line from "The Big Short". It's not just banking. It's any venture that is driven by the profit motive. Pure and simple. Profit motive => Reduce everything to numbers Not right away. Not in a loud and crash fashion. Not one person. But systematically, insidiously, creeping, all together, a step at a time, with the flash of amazing marketing departments and the financial soundness of a well disciplined finance department. Whatever it is you think you're doing, will be metamorphosed into the fungible unit of exchange, like something out of a Kafka book, both absurd and meaningless, while at the same time horrifying. This 'comment' is very sloppily written because it is being written with some urgency because, (god bless HN, where else will I get to randomly interact with Prof. Stein?) I sincerely believe that you have changed the center of gravity in the world and this is an impassioned plea to keep on keeping on when it comes to helping us that are building a future where (given that intellectual property will clearly make up the bulk of our wealth) the wealth is a well tended commons and not a well guarded garden. (Speaking briefly to the "academic" angle of things. I understand a bit what the atmosphere is like. I'm going through a divorce at the moment, and my wife just successfully passed her major comps exam and is on her way to a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in their political theory department. I am very happy for her and wish her the best, but my point is that, I get the pressures in academia to prioritize certain things while other things, which should really be valued and promoted, are totally overlooked or even punished. But, the business world is not the answer.)
• keithpeter 10y ago
  So is the business model likely to be similar to that of RStudio where organisations can buy an annual 'commercial licence' to support the project (in addition to the GPLed version being freely available as mentioned below)?
  • tamana 10y ago
    Free software , paid hosting
• sgt101 10y ago
  How does the trajectory of SageMath compare to Julia?
  • acidflask 10y ago
    This question keeps me up at night, as I presume it does for my colleagues at Julia Computing. Not that switching to a fully commercial model is necessarily a bad thing, but Julia Labs, like any academic group, always has to worry about where funding will come from.
    • sgt101 10y ago
      I think that the problem is that the old model (proprietary development) is pretty unworkable too - but the effects are distributed less starkly. In the old days we had compilers from various vendors at a range of obsolescence, source code would work under a particular compiler and the compiler license was associated with that component. There was no budget for buying a new compiler for a particular project and maintenance gradually got worse and worse, meaning things had to be rebuilt eventually. Good for developers, good for vendors, bad for the bottom line and wider economic development. I wonder what the right size of operation for implementing, innovating and supporting a project like Julia is (not what people would dream of, but the operation that would just about do the job effectively) and I wonder what models could be created to sustain that kind of operation over the right kind of timescale.
  • CJefferson 10y ago
    The two aren't really comparable -- SageMath integrates a huge list of systems which don't have any support in Julia at all (for example, group theory, my personal area).
• macawfish 10y ago
  I love Sage! I used it to find this fractal: https://vimeo.com/155587929 https://vimeo.com/155587929
• cs702 10y ago
  It's SHAMEFUL that academics like Stein who dedicate their lives to developing amazing open-source software do not get funding and frequently fail to get tenure. These individuals truly are making the world better!
  • raverbashing 10y ago
    See the before-the-last slide Academia values mindless papers over actual results.
    • chestervonwinch 10y ago
      To be clear, this is a side effect of using publication count as a surrogate for an individual's total contributions to an academic field. Everyone knows this is the metric for success, so you either have to optimize for it, or risk looking like a failure.
  • algeom 10y ago
    Most academics do not get funding or tenure. Most funded academic mathematicians lose funding at some point. The funding rate for NSF grants in mathematics is certainly less than 33%, and one can only submit a standard proposal once per year. The competition is FIERCE. (I've been on panels: it is terrifying to see who doesn't get funded.) Ask any mathematician -- theorem prover or software writer -- about excellent people she knows who have lost their grants. You will instantly get multiple examples. Mathematicians who write software are no more likely to be "truly making the world better" than those who prove theorems and teach hundreds or thousands of students every year. I'm not saying anything about Stein here. He's a rare mathematician: strong on theory and practice, a passionate advocate for his causes, and a respected teacher. But there is a danger of missing the real point here -- most good things don't get funded or recognized. This has gone on for centuries. The funding situation now in the US (for both theory and practice) is better than it has been almost everywhere for almost all time.
    • douche 10y ago
      It seems trivially obvious that a better use of funds at many universities would be paying for actual academic research at a few hundred K per year, vs a big-name football coach, with all the associated staff, assistants, equipment, etc, for tens of millions per year.
• ddumas 10y ago
  I'm glad William included slide 10 calling attention to the hostile and insulting attitude Wolfram Research has toward mathematicians and reproducible science in general. (I think some of Sage Math Inc's other closed-course competitors likely have similar attitudes, but Wolfram Research seems to be the worst.) "You should realize at the outset that while knowing about the internals of Mathematica may be of intellectual interest, it is usually much less important in practice than you might at first suppose. Indeed, in almost all practical uses of Mathematica, issues about how Mathematica works inside turn out to be largely irrelevant. Particularly in more advanced applications of Mathematica, it may sometimes seem worthwhile to try to analyze internal algorithms in order to predict which way of doing a given computation will be the most efficient. But most often the analyses will not be worthwhile. For the internals of Mathematica are quite complicated." Reference: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/WhyYouDoNotUsuallyNeedToKnowAboutInternals.html http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/WhyYouDoNotUs... For comparison, if you want to audit the Sage Math algorithms that your research depends upon, all you need to do is fire up a text editor (or browse their github). And you won't find any statement in the Sage Math docs telling you not to bother because you're too dumb to understand what you're reading anyway.
  • bitwize 10y ago
    This is why when Big Bang Theory debuted, I thought Sheldon Cooper was specifically supposed to be a parody of Stephen Wolfram. In math, how you came by the results you came by is always relevant. Don't tell mathematicians they don't need to know that. It's their job to know that.
    • carlob 10y ago
      Well, no. They are not at all alike. Stephen Wolfram has a lot more _people skills_ than Sheldon Cooper. Sheldon Cooper is the stereotype of the Asperger scientist who succeeds despite his inability to interact with people, while Stephen Wolfram has been at the helm of a tech company for 30+ years, and that's not something you can really do without having to interact with other people.
      • 10y ago
• RhysU 10y ago
  Jack left?
  • zzazzdsa 10y ago
    Yeah, as of a month ago he works at Google. Source: current Stanford PhD student
• davesque 10y ago
  Slightly off-topic: Does anyone know if Sage allows for lisp-style meta-programming like Mathematica?
  • sold 10y ago
    It's Python - you can do a lot of meta-programming with it, though unlike Lisp and Mathematica there's a division between expressions and statements.
  • williamstein 10y ago
    For what it is worth, lisp is also one of the components of Sage, since we need it for Maxima, which provides some important functionality. sage: lisp('(+ 2 3)') 5
• mungoid 10y ago
  This is why I love sagemath, and open source in general. I cloned the repo a few weeks ago after hearing him mention how he is mainly the sole developer. It's a huge undertaking and i know how draining something like that can be for motivation. I may not have time to do a lot but i am gonna join in and help as much as possible. Documentation, bug fixes, whatever. This project deserves it imo
  • williamstein 10y ago
    Minor clarification -- I'm definitely not "mainly the sole developer" of Sage. There are over a hundred people that have contributed to Sage during the last year, and our release manager (not me) works very hard putting together these releases. I did most of the work on SageMathCloud though...
    • mungoid 10y ago
      Ah yeah my mistake. I worded that poorly and SMC is what I meant. Either way, great work and the rest of my comment still applies! :-)
• TJSomething 10y ago
  I like the idea of SageMathCloud. I had a numerical methods class that I took where we used a web-based Python math environment that the professor was having his grad students build. It was pretty buggy and would go down sometimes. Last I heard, they switched back to MATLAB. Having taught MATLAB, I wouldn't wish that on anyone. But if SageMathCloud had been around, it would have been a good option.
• master_yoda_1 10y ago
  Thanks for doing this.
• qrv3w 10y ago
  SageMathCloud is amazing: https://cloud.sagemath.com/ https://cloud.sagemath.com/, for those that want to try it out. Lots of neat bonus features like Python notebooks, Latex support, and even terminal access. The free tier works great for most applications.
  • keithpeter 10y ago
    https://sagecell.sagemath.org/ https://sagecell.sagemath.org/ Basic interface with no requirement to log in, mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. Probably best for 'calculator' mode tryouts.
• boulos 10y ago
  Glad to see you take the leap! (I launched preemptible VMs at Google and have admired your work from afar)
  • williamstein 10y ago
    Cool! We use preemptible VMs a lot in SageMathCloud -- they are extremely useful for big mathematics computations, which are often easily resumed.
• noobermin 10y ago
  I hate to be that guy, but this needs to be said. The guy on page 15 was right. Sage should have at least put a little more effort into their applications, because if it did, it would be much more popular and thus more developed. Back in 2011 or so, as a young undergrad, I latched onto sage and used it for an undergrad research project. My BS was from a tiny university (one year, I was the only Physics major in the school)..and I tried to turn all my friends and profs onto sage, being small meant there was no dept. standard, so I tried to impress it on the dept. (3 people really) but they stuck with mathematica because sage didn't even have an easy to use ode solver! For pete's sake... I understand that sage is a niche project for the math community, but if that's the case, that's the only place you'll find funding and devs from. This is often said here amongst the startup nerds: make sure you have an audience willing to pay. Hey, many of us in the "more applied community" would love to have a FOSS tool that rivals mathematica, we exist! But it needs to do things well, or at least well enough that in linear combination with the fact that it is open source, the overall goodness vector for the project's value has a timelike norm. Then, we'd clamor for it, you get downloads, and one day, the funders will go, "hey, that's good shit right there, I better be a part of it!" They don't need to do things for others, or for others' interest. But then, no one should be surprised when such efforts don't get funding. I mean, doing something niche implies that less people will be interested which implies that less people will fund it, right? It's almost a direct consequence of choosing to serve a niche.
  • paulmasson 10y ago
    As a developer who has recently begun contributing to SageMath, I have to concur with this comment. It's taken me some time to realize the extent to which Sage is geared toward pure mathematicians. The recent changes, for example, in Sage's piecewise() function have made it much less friendly in numerical evaluation than Mathematica's Piecewise[]. If Sage is to have a wider audience, transitions between symbolics and numerics need to become much more expedient. Perhaps I can help in making that happen. And so might other people reading this thread!
    • williamstein 10y ago
      Please, please help! We desperately need input from you and people with similar numerical/applied experience. Sage is geared toward pure math, only since that's the backend of nearly all the contributors. But our mission statement has always made it clear that we very much want Sage to be of value outside of pure math.
• gtycomb 10y ago
  Prof. Stein's earlier post that had appeared here on HN (http://wstein.org/mathsoftbio/history.pdf http://wstein.org/mathsoftbio/history.pdf) is enormously absorbing reading also. It has much more to tell about the significant challenges that stand in the way of developing high quality open source math software.
• deleted 10y ago
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• ssivark 10y ago
  If you're reading this @WilliamStein, firstly, kudos for the whole effort. I think the providing Sage as cloud math software is a powerful strategy, especially with the trend of end users preferring low power devices. I have some thoughts regarding the comment on Slide15 (making Sage good for some applications): I see that python and Jupyter are very popular for machine learning and allied computations. Can SAGE leverage this to provide a service that a large audience would happily pay for -- and then use that to bootstrap a full fledged mathematical software? (Also, on that note, is there any coherence between the leaders of Sage and Jupyter?)
  • williamstein 10y ago
    I'm reading this. The business model of the company is basically exactly what you're suggesting. Yes, there is very strong coherence between the leaders of Sage and Jupyter. (The founder of Jupyter is just to the right near the back in the picture of Sage Days 1 in slide 16...)
• jordigh 10y ago
  Will, I have been looking for ways to build a company around GNU Octave too. If you find a way to make money, please let me know. Matlab is one of the Ma's that needs a direct replacement. There's so much free Matlab code out there that needs a free environment to run on.
  • williamstein 10y ago
    Hi Jordi! Here's what we are doing: https://cloud.sagemath.com/policies/pricing.html https://cloud.sagemath.com/policies/pricing.html I have so far found a way to loose money. However, I hope that if we can grow usage sufficiently that we'll start making money. You and I are on the same team.
• bradlys 10y ago
  I hope it goes well, William. It was nice to take a couple classes from you at UW in 2014.
• infinity0 10y ago
  I hope they improve their software development practises. Packaging SageMath for Debian has been impossible; they use about 100 dependencies and have re-invented their own internal package manager to build all of these with sage-specific patches.
  • goldenkey 10y ago
    I just tried to get a binary to install it on Windows. Instead they are handing out only OVM files (VirtualBox images.) As much as they might despise closed-source, there are simple things that businesses necessitate - like not being hostile to your audience. I am a fucking programmer, I don't have a problem using VirtualBox. At the same time, it infuriates me that they did not bundle up an MSI or EXE for their windows audience. Now I feel less inclined to even try it, because I already use Mathematica. This basic understanding of "energy to demo something" is the ethos of HN. I am super surprised after reading that PDF to find these simple energy laws of consumerism violated. Aye...I digress...
    • williamstein 10y ago
      I'm sorry. The point of my talk is that Sage is not a viable alternative to Mathematica, etc., for many reasons, e.g., not having a native Windows version. Porting a huge amount of deep technical software from Linux to Windows is the sort of difficult and thankless work that will not get somebody tenure in academia. I tried hard to get funding to get help on a Windows port, and Microsoft donated $30K for this effort back in 2008. However, $30K is not enough to fund such a huge project. In fact, I once met with a bunch of the revolution analytics devs, and learned they were getting millions from Microsoft just to port R to run natively on Windows. This was disturbing, because R is just one of the 100 components of Sage. In my talk, I mentioned the new grant in Europe that is funding the first ever fulltime Sage employee, and it turns out his main job so far is working on a native Windows port of Sage. Unfortunately, though he is incredibly good, he'll probably discover how daunting this project really is. (It's not a one guy for a few months sort of project... And yes, I tried very hard once to port Sage to Windows and failed.)
      • 10y ago
• shiven 10y ago
  Good luck and Godspeed! Academia totally sucks in this deeply ingrained ivory-tower mindset that metes out rewards/tenure/grants based on outdated performance metrics. (Excuse the vitriol, former academic here.)
• arca_vorago 10y ago
  I'm not a math guy, but I am a GNU guy who wants to learn more, and I'm curious what all the math geeks think about GNU Octave? How does it compare to matlab and mathematica? Any quitks or catches that make it unusuable for certain situations? Stuff like that...
  • chestervonwinch 10y ago
    Octave is nice, and it compares well with matlab in my experience. However, I haven't used it in quite some time, as I switched from octave+gnuplot to the scientific python stack some years ago (and I prefer it immensely).
    • arca_vorago 10y ago
      I've heard quite a bit of preference for the python stack, any reasons that come to mind? Is it just the usability of the language or what?
      • travisoliphant 10y ago
        Everyone has their own story around this. For me, the reason I did not go with Octave when I chose to migrate from Matlab to Python was that I wanted to be part of a general-purpose language community. Octave had the nice advantage of being very close to the Matlab syntax --- which has some nice properties (e.g. easier matrix-math expressions and matrix-building expressions) However, I felt there would be more innovation around the programming language itself (think decorators, generators, futures, compilers, and coroutines). The boundary region between "applied-math-programming" and general purpose computing requires a lot of sometimes tedious work. Having a general purpose computing language would mean that more people would be available for that work. Even now, one of the principal challenges of NumPy which is the foundation of the Python scientific stack is that it combines applied math (fft, linear algebra, polynomials) with computer-science (type systems, data-structures, and multiple-dispatch functionals). Maintaining all of that with one group of people is difficult. If we could re-factor the NumPy code base into 1) a data-declaration type system --- i.e. look at datashape.pydata.org which is a generalization of dtype, 2) a multiple-dispatch generic function system (the ufuncs) and then 3) a container object. These could all be maintained by separate groups (and even #1 and #2 could be pulled into the Python language itself). See the libdynd project for a reference example of what it could look like. Then NumPy could be maintained as a set of math libraries on top of that. Then, it would be relatively straightforward to build the octave DSL on top of the Python computing stack and we would be able to share work.
• emmelaich 10y ago
  Good luck to William. I have another perspective though; I knew Allan Steel (Magma guy) as an undergrad at Sydney University. He is an extraordinarily smart person and humble and genial as well. Everyone should be thankful to him and the University of Sydney for having the wisdom to fund the development of Magma.
  • williamstein 10y ago
    Allan Steel is awesome!! I really like him and have learned so much from him -- it's one reason I put his picture up for Magma in that slide. (I think you might be overestimating the extent to which U Sydney funds development of Magma.)
    • emmelaich 10y ago
      Quite possibly! Just after this I had a read of the Wikipedia page of Magma and it says that it is funded on a cost recovery basis only.
• penglish1 10y ago
  Best of luck! Sage is fantastic, and the world needs it.
• williamstein 10y ago
  https://youtu.be/6eIoYMB_0Xc https://youtu.be/6eIoYMB_0Xc is a screencast from the actual talk, including many questions at the end.
  • p4bl0 10y ago
    Thanks. A lot of the important questions not addressed in the slides are answered starting at https://youtu.be/6eIoYMB_0Xc?t=3041 https://youtu.be/6eIoYMB_0Xc?t=3041.
• amluto 10y ago
  I wonder if a simplified variant of SageMath / SageMathCloud would make sense as a Sandstorm app. IPython on Sandstorm is a generally excellent experience, and the sage notebook is a similar concept.
• Ericson2314 10y ago
  This is a prime example of the tragedy of the commons with FOSS. People wonder what academic or corporate incentives need to change, but I'd argue in many cases this work lies between research and business and that's OK. I think the closest physical-world analogue is civil engineering of public works, and we'd be wise to make something of this (in the US they perhaps both underfunded, hmmm).
• rfurmani 10y ago
  The video is now on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eIoYMB_0Xc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eIoYMB_0Xc
• FLengyel 10y ago
  All too familiar. I am reminded why I stopped writing software for academic research. It's considered low-academic-value work, on a par with system administration or I.T. helpdesk work.
• doug1001 10y ago
  Mr Stein released the first version of SageMath some time ago--not sure how long but maybe 2007. among other things, SageMath reconciled the confusing namespace soup that is scientific python (numpy, scipy, and matplotlib--three brilliant libraries with partial overlap in functionality and in package names) which SageMath gathered (along with other libraries like SymPy) and put them under a single rubric, 'SageMath'--one (large) install and you have all of scientific python. SageMath also included a notebook seems not such a big deal now with Anaconda and Jupyter notebook, but in 2007 it certainly was.
• rodionos 10y ago
  Not being familiar with the software itself, but how is starting a company, which is just a legal interface around the effort, would advance the effort? Several comments here indicated that documentation was an inhibitor. Would the company structure fix that?
• daly 10y ago
  (disclosure: I'm the Axiom Lead Developer) I really applaud William's effort to build a company. I wish him all the best and will be willing to provide what help I can. I wrote an AMS diatribe http://www.ams.org/notices/201202/rtx120200320p.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/201202/rtx120200320p.pdf about publishing computational mathematics, making several points, one of which was that "Algorithm implementations are proprietary. This needs to end. Science is not done behind a curtain. At least, it has not been hidden since Tar- taglia and Cardano fought over solving the cubic." However, even if the Ma* software were suddenly open sourced it would be obvious that there was a huge problem. Mathematics rests on several pillars which are currently absent in computational mathematics. Mathematics rests on proofs. Where are the proofs for computational mathematical software? Mathematics rests on research papers, books, and references. Where are the explanations of the theory behind the code? Where are the explanations of the design choices, such as which version of an equation was used and why? Computational mathematics needs much more than bare code. Mathematics rests on courses and students. There may be one course but a whole focused curriculum on computational mathematics needs to exist. Mathematics rests on funding. Universities, government, and some government organizations, like Oak Ridge, are the primary support. William and I have had several discussions around our common problem of finding funding. I was the lead on Magnus (Infinite Group Theory) at City College of New York. We struggled for funding all the time. Axiom can't be funded because there is no organization to handle receipts. Funding agency like accountants. Indeed, accounting is vital to open source funding. I contacted several large organizations asking them to set up an "open source accounting firm" (OSAF) which would accept and administer the grants to open source projects. OSAF would accept the grant, maintain the account, disburse funds for valid receipts, and maintain financial records for inspection. Such an accounting organization is needed if an open source project is going to get government or company funding. If SageMath could handle the OSAF issue then the various contributing projects used by Sage could apply for grants from companies or government, knowing that there is an organization capable of managing the funds. This has the non-trivial side benefit of making SageMath the primary focus. Oh, and SageMath could take the "overhead" (more than 50% at most schools) for "paperwork". My provost lived rather well on the grants.
  • williamstein 10y ago
    Thanks for posting. (1) I strongly agree that the problems of rigorous computational mathematics are far, far deeper than anything I even begin to hint at in my talk. It's daunting. (2) I think http://www.numfocus.org/ http://www.numfocus.org/ -- a new org I think Travis Oliphant co-founded -- may be an attempt to solve some of the accounting organization issues. What do you think of what they are doing? Maybe the best thing is to work with them.