4 ms·

Can you share an example of it getting math wrong?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dagw 4y ago
Here is an article from 2014 by a (group of) mathematicians who used Mathematica extensively in their research describing the problems they had with Mathematica when trying to calculate the determinant of a Matrix containing large integers (on the order of 10k digits). The bug was reported in Mathematica 7 and was still there in Mathematica 10. https://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf https://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf Back when I was using Mathematica a lot (2005-2010ish) the Mathematica usenet group kept an archive of all errors in Mathematica people had found, but it seems to have disappeared off the Internet. If you browse the [bugs] tag in mathematica.stackexchange.com you'll find a few as well (although admittedly many of the issues there are user errors rather than Mathematica getting it wrong)
- an1sotropy 4y ago
  thank for the link to that nice article; it also has some other examples of symbolic math packages getting the wrong result
an1sotropy 4y ago
There used to be another answer here, with a specific link, but now it's gone. I thought I upvoted it, but I'm worried my fumble fingers on my tiny phone downvoted it by accident.
evanb 4y ago
The [bugs] tag on the Mathematica stack exchange has 1900+ questions https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bugs https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bugs Here are two that I found: the character table of some finite groups weren't square https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/252775/7936 https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/252775/7936 this one makes me really nervous as this implies there's not unit testing for the most obvious checks (it's a theorem that the character table must be square and the check is trivial to implement) conjugate transpose didn't do anything to vectors https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/258165/7936 https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/258165/7936 There are plenty more where Mathematica produces the wrong antiderivative or limit.
- an1sotropy 4y ago
  Thanks for this link; I think your reply is the one I saw and then couldn't see, but now it's back. I may be misunderstanding how HN works.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dagw 4y ago

Here is an article from 2014 by a (group of) mathematicians who used Mathematica extensively in their research describing the problems they had with Mathematica when trying to calculate the determinant of a Matrix containing large integers (on the order of 10k digits). The bug was reported in Mathematica 7 and was still there in Mathematica 10. https://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf https://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf Back when I was using Mathematica a lot (2005-2010ish) the Mathematica usenet group kept an archive of all errors in Mathematica people had found, but it seems to have disappeared off the Internet. If you browse the [bugs] tag in mathematica.stackexchange.com you'll find a few as well (although admittedly many of the issues there are user errors rather than Mathematica getting it wrong)

an1sotropy 4y ago
thank for the link to that nice article; it also has some other examples of symbolic math packages getting the wrong result

an1sotropy 4y ago

There used to be another answer here, with a specific link, but now it's gone. I thought I upvoted it, but I'm worried my fumble fingers on my tiny phone downvoted it by accident.

evanb 4y ago

The [bugs] tag on the Mathematica stack exchange has 1900+ questions https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bugs https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bugs Here are two that I found: the character table of some finite groups weren't square https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/252775/7936 https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/252775/7936 this one makes me really nervous as this implies there's not unit testing for the most obvious checks (it's a theorem that the character table must be square and the check is trivial to implement) conjugate transpose didn't do anything to vectors https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/258165/7936 https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/258165/7936 There are plenty more where Mathematica produces the wrong antiderivative or limit.

an1sotropy 4y ago
Thanks for this link; I think your reply is the one I saw and then couldn't see, but now it's back. I may be misunderstanding how HN works.