{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

Do you believe one should keep a gun for self defence?

Sage uses the mainstream programming language Python. Learning Sage will make you proficient in this popular, widely used, and well supported free programming language, which you will likely also use for other non-mathematics projects.

Wolfram, who founded the company that sells Mathematica, admits that the mathematical community hates some of what he has done, arguing that a closed source commercial model is the only approach that can possibly work.

“There’s another thing, quite honestly, that that community has a hard time with. They sort of hate one aspect of what I have done, which is to take intellectual developments and make a company out of them and sell things to people. My own view of that, which has hardened over the years, is, my god, that’s the right thing to do. If you look at what’s happened with TeX, for example, which went in the other direction... well, Mathematica could not have been brought to where it is today if it had not been done as a commercial effort. The amount of money that has to be spent to do all the details of development, you just can’t support that in any other way than this unique American idea of the entrepreneurial company.”

– Stephen Wolfram, 1993, Doctor Dobbs Journal Interview

For the last 20 years, Matlab, Mathematica, and the other commercial systems have dominated with on the order of a hundred million dollars a year in revenue. If the Sage project succeeds at its goals (still a big if), it will have proved that Wolfram is wrong and radically change the landscape of computational mathematics.

from William Stein's "Sage For Power Users"

This Stein is on fire.  I am impressed.  Really.  It's very cool just to explore it.  I have to learn something in the process.  It might motivate me to look into certain areas ...

To completely remove any anxiety over the purposelessness and uselessness of these random explorations once and for all, I will declare mathematics and computing to be my "hobbies" that I explore for intellectual stimulation ...

Open source is now ready to compete with Mathematica for use in the classroom

Sang-Gu Lee has stated that he thinks Sage is superior to Mathematica.

Just for reference:  Converting Sage worksheets to IPython [Jupyter] Notebooks.

Every now and then you find some dirty little module that saves you a lot of tedius work.

I may comment on the details of how to go about implementing this, and the differences in implementing it on Linux box versus [native] Windows.  The module was written for Mac OS, so when converting a batch, you have to change the path in sage2ipython.py in the function convert_all_sage_worksheets

I know that this post is of no interest, but I appreciated finding this.  It is a unique and very brute force solution.


Convert SAGE worksheets to IPython notebooks :A quick and simple solution

Clue: On my machines (with Anaconda environmnents) I save sage2ipython.py somewhere like:
~/anaconda3/envs/py2/lib/Python 2.7/site-packages

Then activate Python 2.7, run shell from the directory which you want the Jupyter Notebooks created.

import sage2ipython
sage2ipython.sage2ipy('/home/hentrich/.sage/sage_notebook.sagenb/home/admin/17,'inequalities.ipynb')

When you start sage:  sage -n jupyter, you can add the path to this directory.

Once you open a notebook, you can change the kernel to Sage 8.0

Restart the kernel and run all cells to generate the output as the conversion only copies what is inside each cell [ between {{{ }}} ].

Note that in Arch Linux, in order to access SageMath kernel after launching "sage -n jupyter", you have to install sagemath-jupyter:    sudo pacman -S sagemath-jupyter

For some worksheets (.sws), the original SageNB is better (as far as inline documentation goes) ...
for that I simply launch notebook() from within a sage terminal session.

My apologies to Raul and Holden.  Sometimes I use this board to write notes to myself in case I had to set something up and I forgot how I did it.  I sometimes work in a hypomanic state where things run smoothly, but months later I will forget how I did it. 

I found a draft of Peering Into Advanced Mathematics Through Sage-colored Glasses

It's one of those works that one may not want to invest funds into since so much information is available on-line; but I am still grateful the authors place the draft online.  If it proves to be packed with gems, then maybe one day it will be worthy of the shelf.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Note:  Tinkering around with the textbooks from the 1960's and 1980's, the ones by Frank B Allen / Helen Pearson; Dolciani, Wooton, Berman, Beckenbach, Sorgenfrey, Jurgensen, Graham, Swanson, et al ... those inspired by SMSG (School Mathematics Study Group) from the early 1960's, as I incorporate Sage and SymPy while going through some of the exercises which lend themselves to being seen through Sage-colored glasses, I now realize that utilizing MathJAX notation within Jupyter [IPython] Notebooks rather than the Old SageNB may be best for posterity.

This way, even as I am doing this solely for my own mental stimulation, there is a sense of some kind of "purpose" where, eventually, over the years, I may amass these notes and organize into a "message to the future" encapsulating the spirit of what those mathematicians were attempting to pass on to the youth in a formal and rigorous manner.

The difference with my project is, I think, that I am aiming at an older audience not entrenched in academia, although some academics might find the project "novel".

In a way, Holden, the motivation for doing this may be partly Bodhisattva-istic, in the sense that, after living an uneventful and often unstable existence interspersed with long and heavy bouts of struggling with substances, especially King Alcohol, I have a definite and deep appreciation for embracing solitude and the Schopenhauer-inspired enjoyment of one's own mental faculties.

I also sympathize with those who enjoy their own mental faculties precisely via the use of mind-altering substances.  It's just that, for this particular kind of endeavor, a clear and focused mind is much more conducive to the kind of slow study involved.

While I still consider pencil and paper notebooks the most important aspect of this type of studying, incorporating a certain amount of work with computer algebra systems into the exercises from older texts breathes a bit of life into the mathematics, where the ideas leap from the forgotten pages through the nervous system and into current bleeding edge Open Source software with the chance that it may perhaps stand a better chance of reaching "the future" - you know, those who Orwell and Zamyatin and even Schopenhauer were addressing.

I know that nothing really matters, but I appreciate that Schopenhauer wrote.  I appreciate that those mathematicians in the 1960's were granted the funds necessary to at least make that great attempt documented in the out-of-print and nearly forgotten texts.   So, yes, maybe all we do is in vain; but what the hell.

My efforts are quite humble in the sense that I am not trying to discover new mathematics, but, in this process, by delving into the structure behind the methods, maybe I just might catch on to what those mathematicians-turned-educators were attempting to offer on a mass scale.

Now, if we can just avoid ferocious wildlife, unpredictable and awesomely powerful weather events, automobile accidents, unforeseeable altercations which lead to imprisonment, etc ..., we might continue to "tinker" ... as we eat food to sustain our animal bodies.

It's good to reflect upon our vulnerabilities with our feet planted firmly on the ground and to cultivate compassion for those whose minds are held hostage by the Hype Engines.

I know it is a challenge not to respond to slights with hatred.  Schopenhauer had mentioned that, when you are filled with hatred for someone, to reflect upon their pain and suffering --- and that might reduce your animosity towards them.

The above mentioned translation can now be found at:  Computational Mathematics with SageMath circa May 2018

I want to be clear about something lest I be misunderstood.   I have explained that I am partial to pencil and paper and do not feel in the least bit compelled to translate any of my "scratchwork" into LaTeX or MathML markup languages.   I do not mean to imply in any way that I am reluctant to use computer algebra systems. 

From PART 1 Chapter 2: Analysis and Algebra

This chapter uses simple examples to describe the useful basic functions in analysis
and algebra. Students will be able to replace pen and paper by keyboard and screen while keeping the same intellectual challenge of understanding mathematics.

I have to insist that the student will not be able to REPLACE pen and paper, but by all means may supplement his or her pencil and paper work, and even greatly enhance his mathematical understanding in learning to use computer algebra systems and the "computing science" that goes along with its use.

I remember hearing Alex Stepanov, creator of STL in C++ kind of poke fun at Edsger W. Dijkstra for writing code in pencil, and that Stepanov only writes code on the computer.

I too write the code with keyboard and monitor, and only rarely jot down in handwriting small sections of code in a notebook for posterity. 

I would never discourage anyone from using pencil and paper for mathematics work, and I would hope that students who use computer algebra systems such as Sage or SymPy or even Maple, Mathematica, or even Matlab, for such things as factoring trinomials do, in fact, recall different methods of doing this by hand with pencil and paper!

My motivation for learning more about computer programming has always been to be able to dive deeper into mathematics.