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hpr_transcripts/hpr0479.txt

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+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
+
+---
+
+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.
+Thank you for listening to Hack the Public Radio.
+HPR is sponsored by Carol.net.
+So head on over to C-A-R-O dot E-C for all of her team.
+Thank you.