[R] FW: Editorial in Notices of the AMS: Open Source Mathematical Software

[Izmirlian, Grant (NIH/NCI) [E]]

Dear Marc:
Thanks for pointing this out to me.  Here is my reply, just sent.  Hopefully the R-core, Bioconductor Core and all afficionados aren't too offended by it, and hopefully it gets published.

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amagid at ou.edu
Open Source Mathematical Software- a reply
Dear Editor:

I very much enjoyed reading the opinion piece "Open Source Mathematical Software", in this month's notices of the AMS, by David Joyner and William Stein. I think the reason I enjoyed it so much was that its intersection with my daily life was not only uncountably dense but of positive Lebesgue measure.  I am a statistician at the National Cancer Institute, and my work regularly involves analyzing data, computation, using and contributing open source computational software.  I say "computational" because I do not wish to offend anyone, for there are those out there who think statistics is not mathematics.  On the other hand, there are those out there who might wonder why the moniker "mathematical" is applied to a piece of software involving double precision arithmetic and or optimization, and may even become suspicious in such cases. 

When anyone says "Open Source" I think immediately of the GNU project, Linux, TeX/LaTeX, and of course, the R project and Bioconductor.  The last two of these, in case there are any readers who are unaware, are a general purpose statistical package, and a statistical package devoted to molecular biology, respectively, and are the only two in my list of open source software that are of an explicit mathematical nature.  I recall using maple on occasion in the past, and will make it a point to try out SAGE.  

The authors point that open source projects are expensive (in person hours) to create and maintain is well taken.  Some institutions generously support them. Everyone needs to be reminded that kudos and citations are a kind of "open source" support, in that they are free to dish out, but en mass are as important as financial support.  Furthermore, as the R project is an open source project with its statistical foundations in double precision computing, optimization and linear algebra one could conjecture that the mathematical community interested in creating and maintaining open source computational software would do well to include the R project and Bioconductor into their studies.

Grant Izmirlian
US National Cancer Institute

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-----Original Message-----
From: Marc Schwartz [mailto:marc_schwartz at comcast.net]
Sent: Sun 11/18/2007 8:35 PM
To: R-Help
Subject: [R] Editorial in Notices of the AMS: Open Source Mathematical Software
 
Hi all,

For those interested, while scanning /. tonight, I came across a posting
which referred to a new editorial in the November 2007 Notices of the
American Mathematical Society:

Open Source Mathematical Software
by David Joyner and William Stein
http://www.ams.org/notices/200710/tx071001279p.pdf

Although brief, it makes for interesting reading.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz