3 ms·

Working with sage for about 17 years, I've had the complete opposite experience. There is no alternative for holistic number theory, group theory, and algebraic

Working with sage for about 17 years, I've had the complete opposite experience. There is no alternative for holistic number theory, group theory, and algebraic geometry (except maybe MAGMA, which I haven't used in years), and sage does these extremely well (sometimes with the aid of things like Gap and PARI), and this is evident by the large number of citations it has in papers. Plenty of leading mathematicians use sage in proper research, a property which I don't think Mathematica shares.

ogogmad 4y ago
Maybe my criticisms are superficial, then. I guess superficially some problems with Sagemath I've found: - If you do matrix algebra in it, it rigidly insists on knowing which ring your matrix-elements belong to. If you have a symbolic variable, then you need to indicate this as part of the ring. Some functionality is not available for certain rings, which sometimes feels overly pedantic; surely a best-case effort could somehow be made? I haven't tried this for a while, but I remember this was an obstacle that I hadn't encountered in Mathematica (or Sympy), which seemed to just do the right thing. Note that normally when working with real- and complex-algebras, I usually resort to various matrix representations. - The pretty-printer wasn't good. Maybe my mistake was insisting it print to Unicode, but it failed to pretty-print the elements of a matrix. It defaulted to printing out Python code within a matrix. Maybe this is a bug? Maybe I should've just outputted to Latex? - The variables weren't pre-declared, so I kept having to write out `var("x")`, etc. This is not ergonomic for a CAS. Sagemath doesn't even ship with a hack like `from sympy.abc import *`.
onos 4y ago
Mathematica enjoys a near monopoly among theoretical physicists. I imagine sage and mathematica then are simply targeting different applications.

ogogmad 4y ago

Maybe my criticisms are superficial, then. I guess superficially some problems with Sagemath I've found: - If you do matrix algebra in it, it rigidly insists on knowing which ring your matrix-elements belong to. If you have a symbolic variable, then you need to indicate this as part of the ring. Some functionality is not available for certain rings, which sometimes feels overly pedantic; surely a best-case effort could somehow be made? I haven't tried this for a while, but I remember this was an obstacle that I hadn't encountered in Mathematica (or Sympy), which seemed to just do the right thing. Note that normally when working with real- and complex-algebras, I usually resort to various matrix representations. - The pretty-printer wasn't good. Maybe my mistake was insisting it print to Unicode, but it failed to pretty-print the elements of a matrix. It defaulted to printing out Python code within a matrix. Maybe this is a bug? Maybe I should've just outputted to Latex? - The variables weren't pre-declared, so I kept having to write out `var("x")`, etc. This is not ergonomic for a CAS. Sagemath doesn't even ship with a hack like `from sympy.abc import *`.

onos 4y ago

Mathematica enjoys a near monopoly among theoretical physicists. I imagine sage and mathematica then are simply targeting different applications.