AJAX Version of Mathematica Coming

stoolpigeon writes "The O'Reilly School of Technology is teaming up with Wolfram Research to provide on-line math courses using an AJAX version of Mathematica. O'Reilly has posted an and interview with Scott Gray, the director of OST, that has more details on the program (named Hilbert after David Hilbert) itself as well as the classes they will be offering."

Re:

[milsoRgen]

Q. Will the Web 2.0 version of Mathematica be very different from the desktop software?

Scott: It will have extremely high fidelity with the Mathematica software. The only difference will be that users will be reading, typing and executing commands on a web page version that connects to a server via AJAX. Mathematica output is rendered real-time via AJAX and CSS.

Re:Is my documentation worthless?

[Brian Gordon]

I am so not impressed by this.. the self-styled "kernel" that actually does anything in Mathematica is already a separate executable, and there are multiple open source frontends to the mathematica kernel. So basically they're just using ol CGI to access the kernel and making some javascript frontend that does the exact same thing as existing frontends, but in a browser..

Re:

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

When I had to start using Mathematica for my courses, ....

Had to, or were too lazy to go without?

Mathematica is a blight upon the scientific world. The price is outrageous, the code is closed source and the learning curve never stops rising. The thing is like some kind of religious oracle; arcane, totally inscrutable, and regarded by almost everyone as infallible. Did I mention the price?

It would be nice to see an open source, scrutable and affordable counterpart to Mathematica. Something like GNU Octave is

Re:

[mhansen444]

Maxima, Sage and Axiom all fail to make the grade, and have infuriating names besides.

Could you elaborate a bit more on hwo you feel Sage "fails to make the grade"? We are definitely interested in feedback to help improve things.

That being said, I think a lot of it is really dependent on the type of math you are interested in doing. For me personally, using Mathematica would be a waste of my time while I've been able to be pretty productive using Sage.

Re:

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Could you elaborate a bit more on hwo you feel Sage "fails to make the grade"? We are definitely interested in feedback to help improve things.

Before you make a polynomial in Sage, you have to declare a polynomial ring.

I find it difficult to adequately express just how asinine this requirement is. And I'm a mathematician!

Sage is to Maxima is to Mathematica as Vim is to Emacs is to Word. I'm an Emacs fan myself.

Re:

[pbaer]

What do you feel is the best alternative to Mathematica?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Maxima. In conjunction with gnuplot. It does everything I needed Mathmatica for, and it's easier for me to export stuff to eps and include in my LaTeX formatted homework.

Re:

[WilliamSChips]

Nowadays, the colleges are requiring you to do (some of) your homework in Maple/Mathematica so they can grade it automatically.

XMLHttpRequest

[milsoRgen]

I for one haven't heard the term, "AJAX", nearly enough.

Re:

[turgid]

Open fire! All weapons. Send out rocket AJAX to bring back his body.

Re:

[finiteSet]

I for one haven't heard the term, "AJAX", nearly enough.

Well, that's because AJAX is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, sautee it. There's, um, AJAX kebabs, AJAX creole, AJAX gumbo, pan fried, deep fried, stir fried. There's pineapple AJAX and lemon AJAX, coconut AJAX, pepper AJAX, AJAX soup, AJAX stew, AJAX salad, AJAX and potatoes, AJAX burger, AJAX sandwich... That's, that's about it.

Awesome

[riceboy50]

Now kids will only need to bring their iPhones to class instead of a calculator!

Re:

[Thelasko]

fprintf('I knew there had to be a MATLAB joke in there somewhere\n')

Re:

[ThinkingInBinary]

fprintf('I knew there had to be a MATLAB joke in there somewhere\n')

You mean:

alert('I knew there had to be a MATLAB joke in there somewhere\n');

right? This is AJAX!

Re:

[foniksonik]

actually it should be:

a) document.write("I knew there had to be a MATLAB joke in there somewhere
");

b) window.document.body.append("I knew there had to be a MATLAB joke in there somewhere
");

c) console.log("I knew there had to be a MATLAB joke in there somewhere
");

with (b) being the best corollary... an alert() is by far the worst option

Re:Matlab

[caffeinemessiah]

You mean Matlab isn't considered the best? I kid, I kid.

Kid you may, but Mathematica is a computer algebra system, which means its good at manipulating symbolic mathematics. Matlab is primarily used for vector/matrix manipulation and is more engineering-oriented. I wish people would realize that in spite of the many commonalities (including the prefix "Mat"), they are different products with different uses and audiences.

Re:

[Mike1024]

Kid you may, but Mathematica is a computer algebra system, which means its good at manipulating symbolic mathematics.

Of course, MATLAB has the Symbolic Math Toolbox [mathworks.com], which "includes the most recent computational kernel from Waterloo Maple Software, Maple 10", thereby completing the Matlab/Maple/Mathematica circle of confusion.

Re:

[amolapacificapaloma]

I wish people would realize that in spite of the many commonalities (including the prefix "Mat"), they are different products with different uses and audiences.

In fact "MATLAB" comes from MATrix LABoratory. Nothing to do with mathematics (semantically).

Re:

[0100010001010011]

Mathematica and Matlab do two different things. Mathematica seems to be more geared towards... algebra. Matlab has a symbolic toolbox, but it's not what it primarily does.

Matlab lets you process lots of large matricies. Simulink for hardware in the loop and other development work is great. /Disclaimer: I work with Matlab/Simulink daily.

But what, exactly, is that saying?

[Quadraginta]

I dunno. I've used Mathematica since it was beta -- no, really, I knew one of the founders at one point -- and it is certainly very interesting, and undoubtably very useful in the educational setting.

But I found when working on the algebra/calculus problems you might find in a bit of cutting-edge physical-science research, it wasn't all that helpful. If I didn't have a pretty good idea where I was trying to go -- e.g. how this algebra should reduce, or what this integral should be, or how this function should behave -- then Mathematica would often either (1) grind to a halt, or (2) give me a horrible multipage expression that defied any kind of gestalt understanding. And, of course, if I did know pretty well where I was going to go, then it was usually faster and somewhat more illuminating to do it myself on paper. What Mathematica ended up doing for me, and this is nothing to sneeze at, is checking my algebra and math, making sure I hadn't added 1 and 1 and gotten 11, that kind of thing.

My feeling is that Mathematica is great for educational stuff, and useful for quick and simple calculations where you pretty much know the answer but don't want to do invest the time it would take to work it out on paper (and you'll instantly recognize whether the result is what it should be), and generally useful for checking your math. But as a serious tool to do difficult math for you with useful results -- I would say it hasn't worked out so well. There's some curious facet of human intelligence that it lacks, some ability to grasp the essentials of a mathematical expression or process that it doesn't have. I admit I can't defined what "the essentials" of a piece of math are, but I can tell when I understand them and when I don't, and probably anyone who's worked with a lot of complex math can, too. (Indeed, I suspect the truly brilliant at math are those who can grasp these mysterious essentials faster and with more clarity than the rest of us.)

I'm not trying to diss Mathematica per se; it's a substantial accomplishment. But like most of Wolfram's stuff, it falls a smidgen short of being the Singularity-enabling tool its most rabid fans seem to think it is.

Re:

[suburbanmediocrity]

I used both significantly, and while you can kinda do more or less the same thing with both platforms, each has their place and I would hate to do some things on one that are trivial on the other. I've also been a Mathematica user since beta, but unfortunately this was at the very end of my college career.

Mathematica really isn't set up for in the loop type operations or engineering design (for mortal engineers), but it can be done with effort. That effort is a bit more than the $6k for the equivalent matla

Re:

[itof500]

Quadraginta,

you might find Howard Gardner's book 'Frames of Mind' interesting. Mathematica may have more use for some folks than for others.

duke out

Re:

[Quadraginta]

Thanks.

Mathematica may have more use for some folks than for others

Unquestionably. I was just a wee bit disappointed in how much good it was in heavily mathematical (but not mathematics) research. It doesn't replace the graduate student, it turns out.

Sage also has a web interface

[k2enemy]

Sage [sagemath.org] also has an AJAX interface [flickr.com].

I've been making an effort to use Sage in place of Mathematica lately and so far I'm impressed. Although, right now I prefer using the CLI rather than the web interface.

Re:Sage also has a web interface

[Garridan]

Actually, it's an AJ interface. Nobody actually uses XML. I think it's great -- of course, I'm one of the primary developers, so I've made it work pretty much how I like it. There are still some issues with it, but it's well over a year old, and pretty stable at this point. During the joint AMA/AMS meeting in San Diego, Eric Wesstein came up to the Sage booth, and said that he'd copied a bunch of stuff from Sage when he was working on the Combinatorica package. Now, it looks like they've copied a bunch of my ideas, too!

I think this is a beautiful thing. When William Stein started Sage, he wanted to beat Magma. Soon thereafter, he decided that he'd need to catch up to Mathematica. Now, less than 3 years later, they're racing to catch up to us...

Re:

[Digana]

Wait, what do you mean "copy"? SAGE is GPL! Oh, dear, will Mathematica have to open up something? Say it is so!

Re:

[Garridan]

He admitted to copying ideas, not code. Sorry to get your hopes up. ;)

Re:Are you kidding?

[caffeinemessiah]

What a great use of time. Hey! Check this out! I've got AJAX for Mathematica!....But I just spent all this time porting an application to the web!

The reason why this is more than just another stupid AJAX port of a desktop app is that it allows for things like very, very easy supercomputing capabilities to be built into Mathematica -- just upload your notebook and let Wolfram's cluster crunch it for you. No munging with parallelization, or setting up and maintaining the hardware. Some other benefits (depending on point of view) of the AJAX port:

1. Sell you a super-expensive license to use this super-charged, supercomputing version of Mathematica that runs on Wolfram's cluster. Trust me, a lot of computations in Mathematica take a very long time. If your computations are wearing down your laptop, simply pay $1000, upload your notebook and have your answer in no time.
2. No need to worry about grad students downloading pirated versions of Mathematica
3. Software updates are made seamlessly and instantly
4. Never worry about notebook backups, allows for collaboration a la Google docs
5. Did I mention point #1????

Re:

[Garridan]

Or, you could use a computer algebra system [sagemath.org] which has easy-to-use distributed computation [sagemath.org] built in already. Oh, did I mention, it's open source, so every single point above (with possible exception of software updates) is completely invalidated?

Re:

[Cornelius the Great]

Shameless plug much?

I'm just giving you a hard time. Actually, I've recently started using SAGE and I admit that it's very impressive for its age. I've been using Mathematica for nearly a decade and used Matlab extensively for my graduate research, but SAGE may end up replacing both for my projects.

Keep up the good work!

Re:

[chakan2]

just upload your notebook and let Wolfram's cluster crunch it for you

And for Wolfram to very easily crunch your work into a New Kind of Science 2: Electric Boogaloo

Re:

[tyrione]

So a gutless coward labels me as a Troll? F*** Y**. Wolfram if he values himself should do the world a favor and do something for Science that progresses the system forward. AJAX? Give me a f***ing break. If Javascript was so f***ing cool then why did we spit on it for years when Netscape tried to make it cool?

Hmm...

[Oxy the moron]

I love AJAX. Seriously, I think it's great stuff, and it's fun to program. But why do some projects have this overwhelming desire to tout AJAX as the "ZOMG IT MAKE OUR PRODUCT ELEVENTY BILLION TIMES BETTER!!" tag with items like this?

What are the other improvements coming about with Mathematica? What about bugfixes? Wouldn't those be more important than "Oooooh, look, the page is more responsive now!"

Re:Hmm...

[garett_spencley]

I love AJAX too. It's the only thing that gets those pesky sweat stains out after long hours of developing asynchronous web applications. It also works well for getting rid of Java.

Re:

[stoolpigeon]

If I understand your point - I think you are missing an important piece of information. It was not previously a web app.

Ah, splendid!

[wattrlz]

I was just worrying about how to solve the problem of campus networks not having enough http traffic these days.

Re:

[KublaiKhan]

Well, considering that port 80 is just about the only damn thing that isn't filtered and shaped to hell and back these days by the major telcos...

Re:

[themacks]

They would probably put a server (or cluster) on campus. Schools would probably even pay for this as it saves on bandwidth and mathmatica licenses.

Hilbert?

[howlingfrog]

A group of computational mathematicians have named something after Hilbert? Shocking and newsworthy! Now, I'm off to take an erdos--it's gauss o'clock already, and I'm still wearing my eulers.

Re:

[BorgCopyeditor]

Go Eulers!

Re:

[treeves]

I call my copy of Excel Ramanujan.

Ajax was here!

[molex333]

Next year the Nation Mathlete Champions can say Ajax was here!!!

The Hilbert Program

[kabloom]

I thought Godel proved that the Hilbert Program was impossible. Now they want to write it in AJAX?

Re:

[kalidasa]

You know you are WAY too much of a geek when you get that joke.

AJAMathMl ?

[Arthur B.]

Would be definitely cool, both for server-client communication and display.

SageMath

[pablodiazgutierrez]

The open source mathematic software compendium Sage already has something similar that you can test right away in SageNB [sagenb.org]. Interestingly, one of the possible backends is Mathematica.

Re:3d cube

[William Stein]

In the Sage (AJAX...) notebook we https://www.sagenb.org/home/pub/1693/ [sagenb.org]render
a 3d cube using the
awesome Jmol library [sourceforge.net].

Parody

[locokamil]

The marketing meeting parody almost writes itself: "Guys, how can we possibly make our slow, bloated software even slower and even more bloated while making it buzzword-compliant?"

Re:

[Eskarel]

AJAX isn't as quick as a native front end, but an AJAX front end onto a massive backend would, in this case at least, be a lot faster than a native front end onto your home PC.

axiom and maxima work fine

[bcrowell]

Axiom and maxima both work fine for me. Admittedly, I don't use them for much more than the occasional nasty integral.

Wolfram is evil. I once bought a copy of the mac version of Mathematica from them, to run on MacOS 6, IIRC. When I upgraded to MacOS 7, it stopped working. Called Wolfram, they said I should pay for a new version of Mathematica.

Mathematica suxxor

[Fred 0101010011]

Too bad for those who must, by some reason, use Mathematica... It is probably the biggest mystery of a software of all times, for instance, the code syntax used are unique to Mathematica and a complete mess, it doesn't make sense at all and reminds me of no other language. Wolfram Is also the evil empire I have heard, treating their customers incredibly inappropriate. I used Mathematica for a project... I ended up wanted to smash my keyboard mainy due to the idiotic-style coding and the general moron-behavi

obselete: javafx or silverlight better

[peter303]

There are easier to develop and maintain environements out there than multi-language ones. Believe me, I've going through the grief. This is a rapidly evolving field.

Anyone recall the unethical crap from Wolfram?

[RecycledElectrons]

Am I the only one who recalls the unethical crap we all had to put up with from Wolfram publishing?

1. I buy their software, and pay for overnight S/H. I get it, and it needs to be activated - not by web, but by a human on the phone - before it can be used. This takes 2 weeks due to some overseas holiday I've never heard of.

2. I set up a web site complaining, and they send phony DMCA take-down notices, saying that I'm distributing pirated versions of their software.

3. Wolfram has been proven to have sent man