Re: A free copy of Maple or a frre maple webservre

On May 11, 9:43 pm, Vladimir Bondarenko <v...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As far as I understand, right now Sage is (much) weaker than Maple or
Mathematica.

It depends what you want to do. In general that statement does not
hold. I case you notice the recent blog post on the MMA blog about
"computing the 10 millionth Bernoulli number" - see

http://blog.wolfram.com/2008/04/29/today-we-broke-the-bernoulli-record-from-the-analytical-engine-to-mathematica/

It took MMA slightly under six days. Sage via Pari can do the same
computation in about two and a half days on a slightly faster system,
so one should be careful about making general statements. And while we
discussed the issue some people started exploring possibilities to
implement it even faster :)

Not knowing what exactly needs to be computed in this case [physics is
too wide an area to guess] I can only make some general statements:

* symbolic integration/limits and so on: Sage uses Maxima and I would
say the Maple and MMA are stronger there.
* basic polynomial arithmetic, linear algebra: Sage ought to be much
faster and in many cases more memory efficient, but that depends on
the problem in question obviously. The interpreter is certainly much
stronger.
* for specialized work in physics there are people interested in
integrating ROOT and a couple other projects from the world of
physics into Sage [as optional parts it seems]
* Sage also ships numpy/scipy, so there is likely some capabilities
some engineers/physicists can use that is pretty capable

Overall Sage is becoming more useful to people interested in applied
math [i.e. the folks who would ask "What is a ring"] as more and more
people from that field are starting to use Sage and also improve it
there, but we do know that we have to do quite some catching up to do.
The symbolics framework written on our end is getting close to a
useful state and should be merged in the next months or so. But give
us another year and we will see where we stand. Contributions in any
area are certainly welcome :)

Cheers,

Michael
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