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Why are some professors negative on Mathematica?

Posted 11 years ago
POSTED BY: Luther Nayhm
31 Replies

Something that I learned years ago (very likely from Feynman or quoted about him to me by someone else) is that, when looking at a dataset in a presentation and listening to the presenter's description of the meaning of the data, in your mind drop the data points from the graph at its extremes and decide if the conclusions make sense. Why? The data at the extremes are often there because the experiment stopped being trustworthy at roughly near those limits so the strength of those points often would be in question....

POSTED BY: David Reiss
Posted 11 years ago
POSTED BY: Bill Simpson
Posted 11 years ago
POSTED BY: Bill Simpson
Posted 11 years ago

The quintessential example that comes to mind for me is the Fleischmann–Pons claim of cold fusion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion

POSTED BY: Steve M
POSTED BY: W. Craig Carter

Bill, your remarks are well put. I think that Tufte somewhere does have a maxim to Be Honest. And he does give several suggestions in Visual Explanations page 34. This might include multiple presentations based on different measures or viewpoints and textual explanation that might address various concerns. That's why I'm an advocate of literate notebooks that make a case and try to clarify and present a true picture. I would be very skeptical of any analysis summarized in a single presentation without extended discussion. In the final analysis it largely depends on the integrity of the person making or responsible for the analysis.

Mathematica probably has the tools to present uncertainty and risk. You just have to figure out how to put them together. With a dynamic presentation you can provide information in tooltips. You can provide information in numerical side reports, which may vary as you move a locator about the primary data representation. You might be able to toggle a presentation between various assumptions. And of course there are the old fashioned error bars and multiple presentations. Your suggestion of fuzzing the data representation might work very well. To go one step further, in a Mathematica notebook (or application) you can give the reader active tools for performing various types of data reduction and the actual data itself. I'm not knowledgeable about statistical analysis of data; I'm sure you can work out much better methods. The point is: Mathematica does give you better tools to present honest results.

Posted 11 years ago
POSTED BY: Steve M
POSTED BY: David Reiss
POSTED BY: Daniel Lichtblau
Posted 11 years ago
POSTED BY: Steve M
Posted 11 years ago

We have walked the same dusty trail. I had forgotten about Macsyma.

I do some of the things you suggest, but in a less ordered fashion. I have several worksheets that I have input various solutions and approaches to problems, and I just keep using the same worksheets. My memory is good enough that I remember that they are in the worksheets and I open one and start scrolling. I call it my cluttered desktop approach.

I second your admiration for Wolfram. And I will look up the reference you suggested. Thanks.

POSTED BY: Luther Nayhm
POSTED BY: W. Craig Carter

"Just playing with Mathematica is a good strategy for staying young"

I tried that Craig and it doesn't work! Running very very fast might work in a relative sense.

More accurately, playing with Mathematica is a good strategy for maximizing the use of your time.

POSTED BY: David Reiss
Posted 11 years ago

Clearly, that is something I have to start doing.

POSTED BY: Luther Nayhm
POSTED BY: Frank Kampas
Posted 11 years ago
POSTED BY: Luther Nayhm
Posted 11 years ago
POSTED BY: Luther Nayhm

Luther, why don't you write me at djmpark@comcast.net and tell me what your project is.

Posted 11 years ago
POSTED BY: Bill Simpson

Probably not what you had but maybe related:

http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/Conferences/5782/

This is by Paul Wellin and he may have been author or a coauthor of the work you have in mind.

POSTED BY: Daniel Lichtblau
Posted 11 years ago
POSTED BY: Luther Nayhm

Dear Luther, I've been puzzling over your observation for nearly 15 years, and I also fail to understand why Mathematica/Wolfram Language gets dismissed by my colleagues so haphazardly. In discussions with my colleagues about this question, I tend to go in listening mode and don't advocate on one side or another. I'll try to summarize what they say below.

Some background:

I'm a professor at MIT in physical sciences and engineering. I've been teaching a course on mathematics and problem solving in materials science for about twelve years, and I use Mathematica extensively in my course. I can't judge the efficacy of my course objectively, but my students generally have very positive evaluations; I've been given MIT's highest institutional teaching awards, as well as the School of Engineering's. I believe that these awards reflect the quality of the Mathematica based course. I give nearly all of my research presentations using Mathematica and these are received well (however, such feedback tends to be biased towards positive)

The summary (I don't agree with many of these, and am still honing my counter arguments)

1) Mathematica is not as fast as X (X may or may not be a compiled language).

2) Mathematica's syntax creates too steep of a learning curve.

3) Our (particular) scientific community uses X; so there are many more routines and working examples in X

4) I am already using X, why should I change?

I believe most of the above are the result of "user inertia".

I don't hear the comment that Mathematica gives "bad results" so much now. I doubt if many faculty roll their own algorithms, but are probably thinking back to when they were postdocs or graduate students--however, there are happy exceptions to this

I believe that the best way forward is to offer students a choice; and hope that they will make an unfettered choice of a their preferred programming language. However, I am not so optimistic: a student who went to graduate school at a university down the street wrote to me saying, "I'm taking this class and they insist on using X and I asked if I could use Mathematica instead, and he said no. We were doing more advanced things in 3.016 ( the sophomore class I teach)."

POSTED BY: W. Craig Carter
Posted 11 years ago
POSTED BY: Luther Nayhm

"starting with my first job at Michigan (we used a Wang with punch cards!!!)"

Around 1982 I had a job overhauling a Wang Fortran compiler (the project name was, not surprisingly, WANGFOR). I also was requested to augment in terms of functionality, the so-called "Wang enhancement" project (WANGENH). (No, I'm not making this up. Not even the project names. It was a Fortran-66 compiler and they wanted to add some of the Fortran-77 capabilities, if I recall correctly.)

My company and Wang Labs had a falling out several months later and, as best I can tell, mutually fired one another. But the work on that decrepit compiler was, I think, pretty good.

So this makes two of us who worked with Wang's Fortran. Also their assembler code, in my case.

POSTED BY: Daniel Lichtblau
POSTED BY: W. Craig Carter
Posted 11 years ago
POSTED BY: Luther Nayhm
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