[ddumas]

I'm glad William included slide 10 calling attention to the hostile and insulting attitude Wolfram Research has toward mathematicians and reproducible science in general. (I think some of Sage Math Inc's other closed-course competitors likely have similar attitudes, but Wolfram Research seems to be the worst.)

"You should realize at the outset that while knowing about the internals of Mathematica may be of intellectual interest, it is usually much less important in practice than you might at first suppose. Indeed, in almost all practical uses of Mathematica, issues about how Mathematica works inside turn out to be largely irrelevant. Particularly in more advanced applications of Mathematica, it may sometimes seem worthwhile to try to analyze internal algorithms in order to predict which way of doing a given computation will be the most efficient. But most often the analyses will not be worthwhile. For the internals of Mathematica are quite complicated."

Reference: http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/WhyYouDoNotUs...

For comparison, if you want to audit the Sage Math algorithms that your research depends upon, all you need to do is fire up a text editor (or browse their github). And you won't find any statement in the Sage Math docs telling you not to bother because you're too dumb to understand what you're reading anyway.

[bitwize]

This is why when Big Bang Theory debuted, I thought Sheldon Cooper was specifically supposed to be a parody of Stephen Wolfram.

In math, how you came by the results you came by is always relevant. Don't tell mathematicians they don't need to know that. It's their job to know that.

[carlob]

Well, no. They are not at all alike. Stephen Wolfram has a lot more _people skills_ than Sheldon Cooper. Sheldon Cooper is the stereotype of the Asperger scientist who succeeds despite his inability to interact with people, while Stephen Wolfram has been at the helm of a tech company for 30+ years, and that's not something you can really do without having to interact with other people.

[johncolanduoni]

I suspect Wolfram also succeeds despite the nature of his people skills. I found this letter from Feynmann[1] to be an interesting and early read on his behavior.

[1]: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/06/you-dont-understand-ord...

[Myrmornis]

That's amazing.

[x0x0]

An acquaintance who worked directly for him would disagree with you.

[carlob]

I still do and I beg to differ. I'm not saying he's the most personable human being I've met but he's certainly not autistic like Sheldon.

[gohrt]

While you are here, would you care to offer any other diagnoses of people you've never met or who don't actually exist?

[nxzero]

People liking you and being able to work with people are not the same thing; possible I misunderstood you, but not clear to me.

[gohrt]

Wolfram invented v1 of Mathematica, and founded a company to sell it to technical users. It takes minimal people skills to hire people and to sell a technically good product.

[tlingo]

As a consequence, math publications that rely on closed-source computations are not independently verifiable, and fail to meet the standard of a rigorous proof.

[programnature]

Did you also appreciate slide 28? "I used to think Wolfram was wrong. Now I am not so sure."

[ddumas]

Yes, though of course here Stein is referring there to the Wolfram quote that's on slide 28 (roughly: certain kinds of development can't be done in academia) and not the condescending rejection of inquiry about mathematica's internals from earlier in the presentation.

[nikofeyn]

you can do such a thing with matlab. many, many of the function calls and algorithms in matlab can be directly viewed.

and honestly, it seems like diving into sage may not be as trivial as you make it sound. is it not a massive glue of many different languages and implementations?

[jimhefferon]

The point is not that it is trivial, but that the system is set up so you can do it. This describes why that is important: http:/www.ams.org/notices/200710/tx071001279p.pdf.