William Stein

40 points

Seattle

William Stein is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington, CEO of SageMath, Inc. and has published 3 books on number theory. He is also the founder of the SageMath software project.

Open Enthusiast Author

Authored Content

Freer than free, opener than open: The fight for the learning management systems

Open source math software competes in the classroom

When I think about what makes SageMath different from other math software systems, it's one of the most fundamental things about it: SageMath was created by the very people…

Authored Comments

wstein

9 Mar 2016

Open source math software competes in the classroom

(1) SageMathCloud also includes Octave, along with a pre-configured Jupyter kernel, and support for using Octave from Sage worksheets. So SageMathCloud directly and strongly supports octave itself, and Sage has an Octave interface. (2) The numerical Python ecosystem (numpy, scipy, etc.) provides a completely different approach to numerical computing than Octave; instead of trying to be a drop in replacement for Matlab (and hence inheriting all the warts of Matlab), the scientific python ecosystem (which Sage packages), provides what many consider to be a far better approach. Instead of a cripled math-only language, one gets a very widely used general purpose programming language (Python), with extensive support for compiled code (Cython), JIT (numba), and a repository of over 75K packages (https://pypi.python.org/pypi).