[Edu-sig] Math + Python: reviewing some themes (long)

[michel paul]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 7:32 PM, David MacQuigg <macquigg at ece.arizona.edu>wrote:


> I'm not familiar with Sage, but I wonder if adding a few packages to "pure
> Python" would do the same.


Well, it would have to be WAY more than a 'few' packages!  : )  Sage is
immense.  It even has the statistical language R built in.  It also has
NumPy and MatPlotLib already included.  Name some high quality open source
math library, and it's probably already in Sage!


> I think of Sage as just a replacement for MatLab, not something I would use
> in programming my mail server.
>

Yeah, Sage would definitely be a more than adequate replacement for MatLab.
The goal of Sage is to be a viable open source alternative to Mathematica.
And I think it's very close to achieving that goal.  I know there are still
things at the moment that Mathematica can do better than Sage, but there's
an army of grad students (and others) all over the world constantly updating
it.  The really cool thing about Sage is that you can use it in a variety of
ways.  If you install it locally, you can use it in a REPL style, just like
IDLE.  You simply have 'Sage:' instead of '>>>' as a prompt.  But you can
also run it in Notebook form through your browser.  It's really well thought
out.  Then, if you don't want to have to install such an immense package on
your individual machine, you can use it in Notebook form purely online.  A
Notebook account is free, and all your work is stored in the cloud.  Now
that I've become familiar enough with it, I absolutely love it.  For
purposes of integrating Python and mathematics, Sage is pure genius.  Would
you program a mail server with it?  Probably not, but that's why Python is
general purpose.

Again, one of the things I truly love about Sage is that at its core, it is
pure Python.  I was delighted with something one of my FST students said.  I
had been using Sage as my blackboard in class, and then I started showing
them pure Python.  My student said that he liked having to think things
through in pure Python better than using Sage directly, because Sage seemed
so overwhelming.  When I had them restricted to just the Python shell, he
liked having to reason with just a small set of constructs.  I was glad to
hear him say that, as it showed he was really getting the message about what
I was saying 'computational thinking' was all about.

- Michel


-- 
"Computer science is the new mathematics."

-- Dr. Christos Papadimitriou
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