Mathics - A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica with support for Sage

http://www.mathics.org/

by clockwork_189 • 14 years ago

189 57 14 years ago

veridies2• 14 years ago

It would be great if it would allow R functions; it's a much better engine for stats than Sage.

ohgodthecat3• 14 years ago

If you can use python libraries there are a few libraries which allow you to use R functions through python, so that may be an option.

Edit:

Here they are:

http://rpy.sourceforge.net/rpy2.html http://rpy.sourceforge.net/rpy.html

veyron2• 14 years ago

Sage covers many things, including symbolic algebra. TMK R does not handle those well ...

veridies2• 14 years ago

Absolutely true. But being able to invoke both would make the software incredibly powerful.

altrego99• 14 years ago

For numeric computations on statistical data I would recommend to keep using R. R does not do symbolic algebra, which is what makes Mathematica so impressive.

christiangenco• 14 years ago

Oh man this is fantastic. Where was this when I was taking linear algebra?

oofabz• 14 years ago

I love a lot of things about Mathematica. Its syntax is not one of them.

freditup• 14 years ago

I think Mathematica is designed more for engineering/non programming folks. You would think this shouldn't affect people with programming backgrounds, but I also have felt Mathematica seems much harder to learn than some other languages.

veyron2• 14 years ago

    Sum[x^2,{x,1,y}]-y*(y+1)*(2*y+1)/6

mathematica correctly handles this:

    $ math
    Mathematica 8.0 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit)
    Copyright 1988-2010 Wolfram Research, Inc.

    In[1]:= Sum[x^2,{x,1,y}]-y*(y+1)*(2*y+1)/6

    Out[1]= 0

but mathics bombs out with error

    Sum::iterb: Iterator does not have appropriate bounds.
    Sum::iterb: Iterator does not have appropriate bounds.

Rickasaurus• 14 years ago

I'm sure it will get better with time. It's trying to catch up with a huge software product that has hundreds if not thousands of professional engineers working full time on it. You should file a bug report.

kanzure• 14 years ago

Could you provide a citation that Mathematica has "if not thousands of professional engineers working full time on it", please? I also find the claims of 100s dubious. But I'm interested.

chj• 14 years ago

The latency kills the fun. But it is free, what can you say!

sn6uv2• 14 years ago

I am an undergraduate physics student, and we are forced to use Mathematica on a weekly basis. I avoid it whenever possible, but this is what I've been looking for. Awesome!

ohgodthecat3• 14 years ago

Why do you avoid it, because it is proprietary?

Because mathematica is actually really a pretty great math program.

sn6uv2• 14 years ago

Yeah, mostly because it is proprietary and crashes often (Mathematica 8 especially).

The vast majority of students in my program are non-programmers. The only 'programming language' they know is mathematica which I think is a real shame.

Worse than that is that most of them have developed a dependence on Mathematica; without it they are severely limited in what they can do. We are provided with free copies (student version), but once we graduate will have to pay the full price if we want to continue using it.

I guess I just don't like having my abilities to solve problems tied to an expensive, closed source program. I do admit, it is very powerful.

akg• 14 years ago

I have tried open-source (octave,mathics) and closed-source (matlab, mathematica, maple) and I can say that nothing comes close to mathematica. In our physics lab, mathematica has truly changed our entire workflow, making it a lot simpler to focus on the real crux of the problem; instead of dawdling around in symbolic manipulation.

I'm not sure what they are using in undergraduate courses, but I think the toolchain by Wolfram has really advanced the way scientists work. It's far from perfect, but it is an amazing tool.

opminion3• 14 years ago

I can't run Mathematica code at home without paying a licence. I can't run it at work without convincing my employer to pay the licence. Actually, I can't run a single line of Mathematica code right now. I can't share it with my friends (to edit, modify, etc).

One of Mathematica's authors offers an unexpected non-solution to that:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7gue5/the_incre...

"You know it's only $139 for students for the full Mathematica, and if you're not a student you can always pirate it."

Wolfram is aware of that issue, they haven't found a solution.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tmutz/stephen_wolfram_...

"But we're still trying to figure out the best ways to make Mathematica as a language be as fully open as possible"

When given the tradeoff between keeping their company running and risk losing language integrity, they rather keep the company running. That's fine for me, but that means that in the meantime I'd use something else. Mathics might change that.

programnature4• 14 years ago

Interesting attempt, but it is easy to break.

Try

Plot[Sin[x], {x, -5, 200}]

The plot is all over the place. In Mathematica it is a smooth sine wave.

You can put the same input into Wolfram Alpha and see how it looks there.

gsivil• 14 years ago

Sad that once more the most upvoted comment is negative. Congratulations for attacking a problem like this one.

pbhjpbhj2• 14 years ago

How do you know how many upvotes a comment has?

drcube• 14 years ago

Aren't HN comments sorted in order of popularity by votes? Is the top comment not the highest upvoted?

I don't know, but this is what I've always assumed.

joelthelion• 14 years ago

This looks neat, but isn't it contributing to the fragmentation of the python numerical ecosystem? We already have Numpy/Scipy/SAGE/SymPy and probably more, do we really need yet another package?

opminion3• 14 years ago

It's built on top of Sage, which is built on top of SciPy.

There is a need for a Mathematica-like syntax parser.

(Edited)

thvdburgt• 14 years ago

I can't seem to find the license for the source code anywhere, that is a bit of a bummer.

mkl• 14 years ago

It's GPL (click on the source code link and scroll down).

iambot• 14 years ago

The use online link is 404 ing, not sure if it's just for me, a pitty I would have liked to have seen that page.

pbhjpbhj2• 14 years ago

>The programming language of Mathics is meant to resemble Wolfram's famous Mathematica® as much as possible. //

Sounds,like the sort of thing an opposition lawyer would bring up in IP proceedings in a "so you copied the implementation and interface" sort of way ...

bconway• 14 years ago

That didn't work out so well for Oracle.

gaius• 14 years ago

Octave has been consciously MATLAB-like for a couple of decades now http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/

pnathan• 14 years ago

What about Maxima[1]? I've used it for the last 7 years when I needed mathematical operations.

Its not only gratis, its libre.

[1] http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

Mathics - A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica with support for Sage

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