On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 3:42 PM, Robert Bradshaw
<rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 3:18 PM, Dr. David Kirkby <drkir...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 12 October 2013 18:21, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Maybe. One important fact is that -- measured by downloads or website
>>> hits -- usage of Sage ("the free software") has *not* grown at all in
>>> the last 3 years. For example, if you define number of active users as
>>> at http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/1000, then the number of users has
>>> floated between 10,000 and 15,000 for several years. This suggests
>>> perhaps Sage is not fully succeeding at the mission statement I set
>>> for the project at the beginning, which is to provide a viable
>>> alternative to the Ma's, since they claim much larger active usage
>>> numbers.
>>
>> I do wonder where they get their numbers from some times. Wolfram
>> Research claimed over a million users more than a decade ago, but why
>> do I see so few jobs wanting Mathematica skills? Search on a job site
>> for jobs needing MATLAB and there are tons of them. Do the same for
>> Mathematica, and there are very very few indeed. I do wonder how large
>> the user base of Mathematica really is.
>
> I think (jobs needing Mathematica) << (jobs where Mathematica is/could
> be used). In my (limited) experience, Matlab lends itself more to
> being part of a full infrastructure/system which increases its
> necessity to do a job vs. "use whatever tool you're comfortable with."
> The numeric vs. symbolic emphasis naturally biases it towards the
> industry (jobs) vs. academia too. (I can't imagine an Math Prof.
> listing that requires familiarity with Mathematica, outside of perhaps
> teaching.)
>
> Also, don't discount the (millions?) of college freshmen that use it
> once a week in their calculus lab :).
"In fall 2013, a record 21.8 million students are expected to attend
American colleges and universities, constituting an increase of about
6.5 million since fall 2000 (source)." [1]
That's just in the US. So worldwide there are likely well over a
million people taking collage math classes (for which Mathematica is
useful) right now. Anecdotally, a substantial fraction use "Wolfram"
(alpha) to help with their homework...
[1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372
>
> - Robert
>
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--
William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org
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