On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 4:59 PM, William Stein <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 9:54 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <[email protected]> > wrote: >> >> William Stein wrote: >>> On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 4:59 PM, rjf <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> You are of course welcome to believe this, but the major competition >>>> for Mathematica >>>> is probably not Sage, but Matlab. >>> >>> For many engineering applications Matlab blows Mathematica out of the >>> water, and I wouldn't even consider Mathematica competition. For >>> many applications in pure mathematics -- hobbyists, education, >>> research, combinatorics, number theory, etc. -- I think that >>> Mathematica is vastly better than Matlab. Apples and Oranges. >> >> Isn't Matlab, like the open source Octave, SciLab and FreeMat >> "knock-offs", a "purely numeric" langauge? They're great tools for easy >> interactive computing, but do they do *symbolic* calculation? > > Not directly. Matlab did *purchase* MuPAD fairly recently, and they > sell MuPAD as a "Symbolic Toolbox" addon. I used to use the Mupad > <---> Matlab symbolic toolbox thing a decade ago for a job I had once. > But core Matlab is very much numerically oriented.
AFAIK Matlab can also interface to the Maple kernel in order to make use of Maple's symbolic computation features. The following book has made use of this Matlab <----> Maple interfacing in introducing applications of abstract algebra to undergraduate students: Richard E. Klima, Neil Sigmon, Ernest Stitzinger Applications of Abstract Algebra with Maple and MATLAB http://www.amazon.com/Applications-Abstract-Algebra-Discrete-Mathematics/dp/1584886102 >> I have never used any of them. I do most of my numeric work in R and >> have for many years. As an aside, there is a package in the R CRAN >> repository that interfaces with the open source symbolic math package Yacas. [...] >> I'm not familiar with that version. Is that the "branding" -- a "home >> version" of Mathematica? Personally, as a working applied mathematician, >> I have not actually bought a licensed symbolic math tool since Derive 6, >> which was clocking in at a list price of $200US IIRC when TI stopped >> selling it. When I need symbolic capabilities now, I use wxMaxima most >> of the time, which has a "Derive-like" UI and has the stuff I care >> about, like Laplace transforms, built in. But clearly Sage, which >> includes R, is going to be my platform of choice once I learn how to use it. > > What are some ideas you have about how we could make Sage easier for > _you_ (and people "like you") to learn? How did you learn R? It would be nice if one can easily use Sage's interface to R in order to install R optional packages. I'm aware that there's work on this front in trac. My current project requires me to use R in addition to a number of R packages. A few weeks ago I tried to install an R package using the Sage <-----> R interface, but it failed miserably. I just wanted to install a local R package, i.e. not installing via connection to CRAN or one of its mirrors. I like R, but I also like to use other built-in functionalities of Sage as these save me a lot of pain in re-inventing a number of things. So I very much look forward to the official release of Sage 3.3 in order to play with the Sage <-----> R interface. -- Regards Minh Van Nguyen --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
