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Free Software brings affordability, transparency to mathematics

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zridling:
This is big:
Until recently, a student solving a calculus problem, a physicist modeling a galaxy or a mathematician studying a complex equation had to use powerful computer programs that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. But an open-source tool based at the University of Washington won first prize in the scientific software division of Les Trophées du Libre, an international competition for free software. The tool, called Sage, faced initial skepticism from the mathematics and education communities.



"I've had a surprisingly large number of people tell me that something like Sage couldn't be done -- that it just wasn't possible," said William Stein, associate professor of mathematics and lead developer of the tool. "I'm hearing that less now." Open-source software, which distributes programs and all their underlying code for free, is increasingly used in everyday applications. Firefox, Linux and Open Office are well-known examples.

The benefits of using free software for maths extend far beyond the usual ones:
The frustrations weren't only financial. Commercial programs don't always reveal how the calculations are performed. This means that other mathematicians can't scrutinize the code to see how a computer-based calculation arrived at a result.... "Not being able to check the code of a computer-based calculation is like not publishing proofs for a mathematical theorem," Stein said. "It's ludicrous."

Darwin:
Wow! Great find, Zaine. This is unbelievably cool (ok, so it's not unbeleivable, but it's close). I'm downloading it now  :Thmbsup:

housetier:
this should come handy -- when I need it! ;)

It's great to see good open source software.

Darwin:
Cool. You can download it or use it as an online application. Nice.

Good thing too. It's a 627MB download!

cmpm:
You may need some of these-

http://www.vmware.com/download/

I had to get the decoder and the player to view the video documentation.

Workstation 5.5 decoder and the player is all I downloaded so far.

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