Episode: 479
Title: HPR0479: OLF 2009: Interview with Dwick
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0479/hpr0479.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 21:21:09

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For one, this is Quattu. I'm in the final leg of Ohio in the next class. I just had breakfast.
I'm sitting here, sipping coffee with Diwik, who is someone I know from IRC.
No, I know in real life as well. How you doing, Diwik? I'm doing good.
Cool. So you are, as it turns out, a math like teacher or something or just a mathematician?
I'm a professor, associate professor of mathematics, yeah.
Okay, cool. And you have a lot of math software you use on Linux, I guess.
That's kind of what I've been doing lately. A couple of programs, open source programs,
the kind of replacements for some really serious proprietary packages that I've been looking at.
Really? So, first of all, what kind of math on a computer to me is a calculator? What exactly are you talking about?
Okay. The most serious package is what are called computer algebra systems.
Mathematica. Have you had a wolf form?
A wolf form alpha?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Steve will forget his first name, but he developed mathematics.
It's a computer algebra system. It does calculus. It does symbolic algebra. It does all kinds of everything.
Maple is another similar program. We have a license for Maple at our university.
25 user license costs four to five thousand dollars. These are high-powered programs.
Okay. Matt Labs is kind of similar, but so the one I've been looking at is called Sage.
A mathematician at University of Washington has developed it.
Their mission statement is to become an open source replacement for mathematics and math lab and maple.
Wow. University of Washington is the same people who did pine and pico.
I believe unless I'm mistaken. So you go into this package or whatever and you choose what kind of discipline you're going to be doing.
And then you pose your question, basically, or more of a helper application like, oh, I see you want to do calculus.
It's actually the Sage has written in Python, but actually what he did, there's a whole bunch of open source packages out there that have been around forever that do specialized mathematics.
And he took all of those and sort of packaged them together with Python interface.
Okay. So you got to go in. You got to do a little coding and tell essentially what you wanted to do.
Wow. Do you want to do some calculus or number theory or whatever.
Wow. It's the interface. Well, there's two interfaces.
But the one that easiest to use is a web interface. He's a browser.
And they actually have servers that you can just go to and have free servers to run it right up the way.
Wow. That's really cool. Okay. So as a video editor, you know, I get two tapes of footage and someone says here, try to edit this together to make it look like, you know, the wedding was a good lot of fun.
And I go do it. How do you know? I mean, like someone come to you and say, here, do you, here's a bunch of numbers, put them together to make a curve, whatever.
I mean, how do you know what's the workflow, I guess? How do I use it? Yeah.
The guy developed it as a research tool. He's a number theory, but because it's really powerful, but it's also got some great graphics.
Excuse me. The way I've been using it recently is in class. I used to demos or I write labs for my students to do where they, I taught numerical analysis class, which is a real computationally intensive.
So here you use this package to do the calculations. They took to it pretty well. It was pretty cool.
Is there a one or two sentence thing that you can tell me what number theory is? I've heard the term fascinated by it. Don't really know the specifics.
No, I'm not a number. There is myself study of numbers.
The computation side of these things, like, I mean, I know that, I mean, computers are just, I mean, that's what they do. They crunch numbers.
I know that there was a software that I was using for hardware testing at an old job that would literally, it would just calculate the primes, a certain sequence of primes.
And it was 64-bit, and you would run it, and it would, the CPU would get hot, and the temperatures would go right up, just right away.
This is actually a fairly intensive application to run.
So do you run it on your laptop or your desktop?
I've set up my own server on my laptop, so for personally use I do. If you use the web server, you could run into some problems if you're doing some heavy stuff.
What plans next year is to set up a tablet dedicated server on campus so that all of these can access it.
That's pretty neat. I mean, it's really cool that you're implementing it in your classroom.
You know, I mean, it's like open source in schools.
Yeah, that's all I can do to sort of get on the pen fit, because hopefully there's another package, which is a little lower level. It's called Geo Geobra.
It's used it in some workshops, and it's really cool, too, but hopefully I'd like to, at some point, be able to contribute to these programs in some way.
I used to know for a train a long time ago, but I don't do any coding now. I have some students to do.
So one of my goals is to try and get some students in myself involved.
I have a particular sort of module I'd like to see added to Geo Geobra that I've talked to the developers about.
It's sort of halfway there, but I would like to do that in the future, too.
Yeah, you are.
No, that's cool. I mean, it's good to try to contribute to the projects that you are using, because that's how much to the stuff gets done.
I guess it's, you know, the proverbial scratching around it, you kind of think.
So what distro, do you know and love for distros?
I've run Ubuntu on my laptop for a couple years.
I've run Debian testing at home for probably four or five years straight without changing it all.
And I've actually just installed Fedora 11 on my laptop as well.
And I've run that for the last few weeks.
Cool. Yeah, I think there's a math, either a math or a science respin of Fedora.
I don't know what packages they have, but it exists.
I just kind of prefer to make my own respins, I guess, so I don't really usually get pre-packaged stuff.
Some of those respins are good, because they're actually by people who do that kind of stuff.
I did one with Ubuntu.
You heard of the Ubuntu customization kit.
Yeah, yeah.
So I was given a talk in New Orleans on pre- and open source software and mathematics and education.
Part of that was those things I was telling you about, but other stuff.
So I made my own and took it, gave them ways.
It was end up being about two gigs, because I just loaded it with everything.
Yeah.
Put a sage server on there.
Yeah, that's cool.
All right, cool.
So what did you think of the festival that's here?
This is your first one.
That was my second.
I liked last year better.
Not a lot of the talks or what I was looking for.
I'm sure a lot of people liked them.
What are you looking for?
Math theory.
No, I like the GNOME 3.0.
It's just something more user-oriented, as opposed to IT type stuff.
Yeah, I guess it wouldn't be.
15 minutes of talks that you last night.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah, like little lightning talks about topics that just normal user is going to know about.
Right.
Just tips or whatever.
15 minutes, contributed sessions.
You could still have them refereed or whatever, proposing to have somebody sort of sort through the crap.
Yeah.
I don't think it would be a bad idea to have a track dedicated to the average user, as I call it.
You and me, however much we might want to code, we don't realistically.
What we do all day is sit in front of, you know, such and such.
An environment or an application and do stuff.
Yeah, we might have interesting things this year.
Yeah.
It's what you guys build into podcasts.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
Heading out today.
Mm-hmm.
Great meeting you.
Thanks for doing the interview.
Cool.
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