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.
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/
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.
As a an academic contributor to a mathematical software project (much less mature than Sage), I want to thank you for giving this talk. Hope it starts a much-needed public discussion about this topic.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I think people underestimate how much work a professor does. Everybody in my department who started a company either did it before starting at the university or they did it while on sabbatical.
If you do the bare minimum work as a tenured professor you're going to get an awful lot of people extremely mad at you at all levels of the academic hierarchy.
If you do the bare minimum work and you're spending a lot of time on your own company, at my university, you will almost certainly get a pink slip. Doesn't matter if you have tenure. We are not allowed to work more than one day a week on such things, and that requires approval, which probably won't happen if we're not publishing, have terrible teaching evaluations, and aren't doing a full share of service and advising.
I have tried for a while now, and I thought I could do both. But... (1) It is difficult on a personal level--for example last month SageMathCloud got hit by a major DDOS attack 15 minutes before I had to teach a class. I have family and though I love to work, there are only so many hours in a day. (2) There I am at a big old state university, and there are many complicated byzantine conflict of interest and IP rules, which have been a pain to navigate, and our university commercialization office isn't the best. (3) Investors greatly prefer that the person/company they are investing in is not just a side project for the person running it. All that said, the mathematics department at University of Washington is full of supportive faculty; I'm doing what I'm doing more for the people I want to hire than just for myself.
Why not take a leave of absence to at least get the company started and acquire some funding? After that, you could just have a consulting role with the company.
I did during my 2014-2015 sabbatical. Building a successful company is vastly more difficult and demanding of attention than I could have imagined. Maybe I'm just not as good at doing multiple difficult things at once as other people.
Because there's no way to grow. He's been unable to secure grant funding for actual employees, and even had trouble getting money to keep the servers running.
He's looking for ways to make safe and open source software dominate. And there needs to be a lot of growth for that to happen.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, they are bound to sage. I really, really want to break things apart into separate Python modules that can be used outside Sage. However, that's an enormous amount of work that doesn't help at all with finishing a math research paper, so it's unlikely to happen without money. I've proposed and brought up exactly this very frequently on the Sage mailing lists in the last year. If the company makes money, one my dreams is that all of Sage will be available as smaller modules that are pip installable....
Readers should keep in mind that cython originated from the sage codebase. I bet there's lots of gems in there that many people would like to play with independently of sage.
Will you need to release these modules under the GPL?
Recently we did factor out the code in sage for Cython signal handling (so you can hit control+c to interrupt blocking Cython code!) into a separate library called cysignals. We changed the license from GPL to BSD when doing this!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, it was the 'go to' seminal text for a while. I've used his malloc implementation in a few projects. He's also an ACM fellow, so, not really unsung (not denigrating his work, just saying that his work is fairly well known in both academia and the industry).
Sorry, I meant unsung in the sense that his work doesn't produce lots of the usual markers of academic success, iepapers. Also, Oswego is not really what you'd call an academic powerhouse. Measured by impact, I'd think there's be a software engineering group at cmu, mit, berkeley, stanford, michigan, madison, etc that would love to have him work there.
Yeah, he licenses SparseSuite out for commercial use.
His personal payout would be very tiny (if any at all), after U of F's take and money his lab gets. But at least its some funding to keep his lab going.
I'm not sure this is the same case here, although I am biased I readily admit. Everyone and their mom uses matlab. Sage on the other hand is mainly used in the mathematics community which I'm pretty sure is much smaller than the community (community?) or engineers, physicists, biologists, data scientists...
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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).
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 is #7 in lifetime earnings on Leanpub. (Also, one of the core contributors on Laravel has done even better: 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 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.)
Hopefully one day textbook prices can return to a sane level, say between $30 and $80. Today's textbook racket (I don't want to call it a market) is obscene.
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.
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.
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 Bi...
Thank you for your comment, which I've carefully read. Feel free to email me at wstein@gmail.com, though I can't guarantee I'll have much time to answer, since I'm pretty busy. Indeed, one must constantly guard against the many intrinsic evils of corporations.
What you are describing is the status quo, but it is certainly possible for government to fund software development. As William points out in his presentation, it is already being done indirectly through software license purchases. I think it would be interesting to see what academics could achieve if they were offered some modest grants aimed at developing and maintaining viable open-source alternatives to all commercial software for which government is currently paying license fees.
"I think it would be interesting to see what academics could achieve if they were offered some modest grants aimed at developing and maintaining viable open-source alternatives to all commercial software"
I think this would be a waste of academics. Commercial software is not expensive (mostly) because of some secret sauce. It's because delivering a functioning product requires lots of work that is thoroughly mundane and repeatable.
Analogously, one could employ chemists to bottle coca cola or metallurgists to package hammers but that would be just a waste of everyones assets.
Should government make it's own pencils? I don't think so.
Good products require lots of work that is hard to be intrinsically motivated of.
Academics already perform a lot of repetitive and mundane work (e.g. teaching, writing grant applications). A fallacy of the current academic climate is that academic results must be novel. This has lead to pathological behaviour where researchers flood publication venues with incremental results portrayed as breakthroughs. Performing a public service such as maintaining a widely used software package is at best seen as a second-tier achievement.
I am not suggesting that the government should be involved in making pencils. But I do think funding independent development of open tools for research, education and other government-funded work is a good idea.
To support my claim, compare the cost of healthcare in the US, where the government relies on the industry to keep medical products and services cheap, with the price in countries where the government provides its citizens with an alternative.
Another issue is "sustained development". I collected over 100 "computer algebra programs" on a CD. I distributed this at a computer algebra conference. All 100+ were academic attempts, usually by small groups or one person. They are amazing programs that will never get widely used.
Mathematics, Maple, Axiom, Maxima and other programs are large, multi-person, multi-year, multi-million dollar efforts with contributions by PhD-level researchers.
Axiom, I estimate, has about 300 person-years, over many years at IBM Research, with an estimated cost of 42 million dollars. People who invented new areas of computational mathematics were primary contributors. IBM sold Axiom and it was a commercial competitor to MMA and Maple. It is now open source (due to the good graces of the Numerical Algorithms Group, NAG)
Magnus, which I was also involved in, is much smaller and very specialized. It was originally developed by government grants but development fell off once that ended. Magnus was developed at City College of New York.
Based on that experience I feel that computational mathematics development requires company backing to develop any well-maintained and well-documented system.
The downside is that companies tend to die in less than 15 years:
"The average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P 500 index of leading US companies has decreased by more than 50 years in the last century, from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today, according to Professor Richard Foster from Yale University."
and that's for LARGE companies. Small companies die quicker.
So what happens to computational mathematics when Wolfram Research (Mathematica) or Cybernet Systems (Maple), etc. dies? Does your MA* research die? Is there suddenly a huge black hole in the middle of computational mathematics? Can you no longer reproduce your results?
Mathematica won't be open sourced when WR fails because software is now considered a company asset. Even if it was open sourced, my contacts tell me that the internals are not well documented. Computational mathematics is REALLY hard to reverse engineer.
Somehow we need to make it possible to maintain, modify, and extend existing systems. This requires a few things, in my opinion.
We need academic (and grant funded) programs that specifically target computational mathematics. The goal is to develop a stream of people who have the necessary background, not to develop a new system.
We need to deeply DOCUMENT the ALGORITHMS so they can be reproduced in any of the existing systems. Theory is fine but programming involves design tradeoffs, such as a choice of representation, available functions, test suites, boundary conditions, reference results, etc. There are a dozen equations for things like the gamma function but some are better than others for implementation.
We need government focus. Computational Mathematics is vital and is fundamental research. We need a "summer of mathematics" workshop that involves all of the players presenting a reasonably unified approach. OpenDreamKit in Europe is doing something big about it now. The U.S. should step up and participate in some official capacity. Computational mathematics benefits everyone and should be an international effort.
I hope that SageMath can bring these things into focus and lead us to a better place.
I sought government funding for Axiom. One of the direct comments in feedback was that the government does not fund software that competes with a commercial product. There were other issues (such as a lack of professional accounting for handling grants) but this issue could not be overcome.
> the government does not fund software that competes with a commercial product
That is such a ridiculous constraint. Do they mean that, if I start selling tapped water for $100 a gallon, the government can not provide its citizens with an alternative? Obviously it both can and does in many important areas (water, education, electricity, roads and defence to name a few). The decision on whether government should be active in a market should be based on an analysis of the benefits it can bring to society – be it savings, innovation or equality of opportunity.
Academia is about theory that is correct (and therefore potentially useful). There is a huge potential conflict of interest whenever you use a commercial stack in your research, for the providers of the stack are not really interested in providing error-free robust products. Lingering errors in Mathematica are well-documented, for instance, and all they do about them is to put up smokescreens. Does one need to wait for a huge scandal for the change of attitude here?
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)?
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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
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.
Since when it has become acceptable that the goal of academic institute is/should be dirty ROI?
And then why just football? Start funding cabaret, rave parties and poll-dance events as they surely will have more ROI.
Sports has been the undoing of US education in schools [1] earlier and now it seems even in higher ed.
The sooner they get rid of sports from educational institutes the better for them.
I was on staff at a small science and engineering school with a top 25 football team, and I was the faculty rep for the cycling team. I had no love for football, and I say that as someone who played in highschool. Until I saw the finances and realized they funded the entire sports program. As much as it pained me, I had a hard time complaining after that.
By definition of positive ROI, the university has more money than before, which in particular means it can spend more money on research by building football stadia.
On the wider scale, extracurriculars only affect[2] share-of-students rather than increase the total number of students[1], so such programs have a globally negative ROI. But each individual university is making a rational decision.
[1] I'm assuming there's a negligible percentage of students that would avoid college entirely if no or very few colleges had football programs. It's safe to ignore football scholarships, because you still have the option of giving the students free money, which is cheaper than giving them free money and also running a football program.
[2] I'm also assuming the football program itself doesn't generate enough revenue to offset its costs, and only affects enrollment. I honestly don't know if they make enough money in tickets and trinkets to offset the debt service for a stadium, salaries for coaches, free tuition for students, etc. If the ROI is positive(or even negative, but with a positive cap rate), then it might be rational economically to continue them.
You're assuming that the ROI generated by football isn't a transfer from other universities who lose students to the spending uni. More likely, funding football is a zero sum game which generates no overall benefit for the research community.
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.
How can this be true in the case of a mathematician who writes something that many/most of the others use?
I think nontraditional research organizations like YC Research and Google's Project Zero can solve this problem.
--
Open source basic infrastructure -- everything from Sage to OpenSSL -- suffers from a market failure.
We rely on these foundational projects for billions of dollars a year in commerce, but they often get minimal funding and are supported by semi-broke volunteers working in anonymity.
* GPG is maintained by one guy, who was about to give up before a few people threw coins in his tip jar after this story a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791
* OpenSSL was comically underfunded and underappreciated until Heartbleed happened and people remembered how much it matters
Stein's story is powerful and shows how neither traditional companies nor universities help here. In the world of math software:
* The companies created a bunch of closed-source walled gardens (Mathematica, Matlab, etc).
* The universities were unwilling to support free and open tools. They gave tenure and support only for authors of research papers, not tools, no matter how useful or widely deployed.
Even the guy who made NumPy and SciPy didn't get recognition for it---wtf.
I think that these new, independent organizations with rich patrons can fill in the gap. Organizations like YC Research, Project Zero, and Canonical.
These projects are a crucial part of the infrastructure of the modern information society. The solution to a lack of funding for these things is not charity from rich patrons, but governmental investment based on taxes.
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."
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.
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.
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.
I suspect Wolfram also succeeds despite the nature of his people skills. I found this letter from Feynmann[1] to be an interesting and early read on his behavior.
Wolfram invented v1 of Mathematica, and founded a company to sell it to technical users. It takes minimal people skills to hire people and to sell a technically good product.
As a consequence, math publications that rely on closed-source computations are not independently verifiable, and fail to meet the standard of a rigorous proof.
you can do such a thing with matlab. many, many of the function calls and algorithms in matlab can be directly viewed.
and honestly, it seems like diving into sage may not be as trivial as you make it sound. is it not a massive glue of many different languages and implementations?
The point is not that it is trivial, but that the system is set up so you can do it. This describes why that is important: http:/www.ams.org/notices/200710/tx071001279p.pdf.
Yes, though of course here Stein is referring there to the Wolfram quote that's on slide 28 (roughly: certain kinds of development can't be done in academia) and not the condescending rejection of inquiry about mathematica's internals from earlier in the presentation.
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
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...
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.
SageMathCloud is amazing: 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.
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.
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!
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.
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It appears this talk was given in the context of the Benjamin Pierce Centennial Conference:
http://www.math.harvard.edu/conferences/bp/
Congratulations!
May you have fair winds and following seas.
Also I'd like to wish you luck with your endeavors!
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.
Good luck!
He's looking for ways to make safe and open source software dominate. And there needs to be a lot of growth for that to happen.
Will you need to release these modules under the GPL?
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.
[1] http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/ldl.html?requestedD...
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.
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.
His personal payout would be very tiny (if any at all), after U of F's take and money his lab gets. But at least its some funding to keep his lab going.
x = A\b gives the solution to Ax=b, and x=b/A gives the solution to xA=b. But when would you type A/b ?
What will be the source of revenue? Dual-license? Support?
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?
1) A lot of companies have policies against using software that they cannot buy support contract for (regardless of the quality of the support)
2) if there is an individual/small buzz reasonable option, a lot of companies and people like to pay for it as a way to given financial support.
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.
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.)
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.en.html
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 Bi...
I think this would be a waste of academics. Commercial software is not expensive (mostly) because of some secret sauce. It's because delivering a functioning product requires lots of work that is thoroughly mundane and repeatable.
Analogously, one could employ chemists to bottle coca cola or metallurgists to package hammers but that would be just a waste of everyones assets.
Should government make it's own pencils? I don't think so.
Good products require lots of work that is hard to be intrinsically motivated of.
I am not suggesting that the government should be involved in making pencils. But I do think funding independent development of open tools for research, education and other government-funded work is a good idea.
To support my claim, compare the cost of healthcare in the US, where the government relies on the industry to keep medical products and services cheap, with the price in countries where the government provides its citizens with an alternative.
Mathematics, Maple, Axiom, Maxima and other programs are large, multi-person, multi-year, multi-million dollar efforts with contributions by PhD-level researchers.
Axiom, I estimate, has about 300 person-years, over many years at IBM Research, with an estimated cost of 42 million dollars. People who invented new areas of computational mathematics were primary contributors. IBM sold Axiom and it was a commercial competitor to MMA and Maple. It is now open source (due to the good graces of the Numerical Algorithms Group, NAG)
Magnus, which I was also involved in, is much smaller and very specialized. It was originally developed by government grants but development fell off once that ended. Magnus was developed at City College of New York.
Based on that experience I feel that computational mathematics development requires company backing to develop any well-maintained and well-documented system.
The downside is that companies tend to die in less than 15 years:
"The average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P 500 index of leading US companies has decreased by more than 50 years in the last century, from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today, according to Professor Richard Foster from Yale University."
and that's for LARGE companies. Small companies die quicker.
So what happens to computational mathematics when Wolfram Research (Mathematica) or Cybernet Systems (Maple), etc. dies? Does your MA* research die? Is there suddenly a huge black hole in the middle of computational mathematics? Can you no longer reproduce your results?
Mathematica won't be open sourced when WR fails because software is now considered a company asset. Even if it was open sourced, my contacts tell me that the internals are not well documented. Computational mathematics is REALLY hard to reverse engineer.
Somehow we need to make it possible to maintain, modify, and extend existing systems. This requires a few things, in my opinion.
We need academic (and grant funded) programs that specifically target computational mathematics. The goal is to develop a stream of people who have the necessary background, not to develop a new system.
We need to deeply DOCUMENT the ALGORITHMS so they can be reproduced in any of the existing systems. Theory is fine but programming involves design tradeoffs, such as a choice of representation, available functions, test suites, boundary conditions, reference results, etc. There are a dozen equations for things like the gamma function but some are better than others for implementation.
We need government focus. Computational Mathematics is vital and is fundamental research. We need a "summer of mathematics" workshop that involves all of the players presenting a reasonably unified approach. OpenDreamKit in Europe is doing something big about it now. The U.S. should step up and participate in some official capacity. Computational mathematics benefits everyone and should be an international effort.
I hope that SageMath can bring these things into focus and lead us to a better place.
That is such a ridiculous constraint. Do they mean that, if I start selling tapped water for $100 a gallon, the government can not provide its citizens with an alternative? Obviously it both can and does in many important areas (water, education, electricity, roads and defence to name a few). The decision on whether government should be active in a market should be based on an analysis of the benefits it can bring to society – be it savings, innovation or equality of opportunity.
Academia values mindless papers over actual results.
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.
Sports has been the undoing of US education in schools [1] earlier and now it seems even in higher ed. The sooner they get rid of sports from educational institutes the better for them.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case...
Also, The Atlantic is not a reliable source. It prints garbage like this:
"Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student."
even though everyone at the school takes math, very few play football, and not everyone involved in football is a player.
Atlantic may or may not be a reliable source. What about this? A coach is given a whooping $7,004,000 salary.
Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh is in his first year with the Wolverines and sits behind Saban with a $7,004,000 total pay. [1]
[1] http://www.si.com/college-football/2015/10/08/highest-paid-c...
On the wider scale, extracurriculars only affect[2] share-of-students rather than increase the total number of students[1], so such programs have a globally negative ROI. But each individual university is making a rational decision.
[1] I'm assuming there's a negligible percentage of students that would avoid college entirely if no or very few colleges had football programs. It's safe to ignore football scholarships, because you still have the option of giving the students free money, which is cheaper than giving them free money and also running a football program.
[2] I'm also assuming the football program itself doesn't generate enough revenue to offset its costs, and only affects enrollment. I honestly don't know if they make enough money in tickets and trinkets to offset the debt service for a stadium, salaries for coaches, free tuition for students, etc. If the ROI is positive(or even negative, but with a positive cap rate), then it might be rational economically to continue them.
How can this be true in the case of a mathematician who writes something that many/most of the others use?
--
Open source basic infrastructure -- everything from Sage to OpenSSL -- suffers from a market failure.
We rely on these foundational projects for billions of dollars a year in commerce, but they often get minimal funding and are supported by semi-broke volunteers working in anonymity.
* GPG is maintained by one guy, who was about to give up before a few people threw coins in his tip jar after this story a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791
* OpenSSL was comically underfunded and underappreciated until Heartbleed happened and people remembered how much it matters
Stein's story is powerful and shows how neither traditional companies nor universities help here. In the world of math software:
* The companies created a bunch of closed-source walled gardens (Mathematica, Matlab, etc).
* The universities were unwilling to support free and open tools. They gave tenure and support only for authors of research papers, not tools, no matter how useful or widely deployed.
Even the guy who made NumPy and SciPy didn't get recognition for it---wtf.
I think that these new, independent organizations with rich patrons can fill in the gap. Organizations like YC Research, Project Zero, and Canonical.
We need more of them.
"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/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.
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.
[1]: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/06/you-dont-understand-ord...
and honestly, it seems like diving into sage may not be as trivial as you make it sound. is it not a massive glue of many different languages and implementations?
Source: current Stanford PhD student
sage: lisp('(+ 2 3)')
5
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
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.
Basic interface with no requirement to log in, mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. Probably best for 'calculator' mode tryouts.
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.
Perhaps I can help in making that happen. And so might other people reading this thread!