
Mathematica on Raspberry Pi for free - 2pi
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/5282
======
jordigh
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes... I fear the Greeks even when they bring
gifts...

I don't get it... Wolfram is a money-hungry egomaniac. For example, unlike the
other big Ma competitors (Maple, Matlab, Magma) not a single source line of
Mathematica code is exposed. He's litigious, he labels everthing "mine", he
endlessly praises himself. He wrote this insulting "don't worry your pretty
little head with our source code, it's too complicated for you" piece:

[http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/WhyYouDoNo...](http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/WhyYouDoNotUsuallyNeedToKnowAboutInternals.html)

So... gratis Mathematica on Raspbian... what's the catch? Is it to lure us to
the cloud?

[http://www.wolframcloud.com/](http://www.wolframcloud.com/)

Edit: To clarify, my guess here is that they want to give people a taste of
Mathematica on weak hardware in order to lure them to a subscription model on
"the cloud" where much more processing power will be available, just like
widespread university site-wide licenses and turning a blind eye to student
piracy are great marketing strategies.

Is there any evidence to support my wild theories?

~~~
hyperbovine
What a ridiculous post. The quote in question is a reference the Trojan horse,
so unless you are suggesting that loading Mathematica onto the Pi will, in
fact, destroy it, I don't see any merit to this analogy. And while it's true
that Steve Wolfram is incredibly arrogant, so too is the act of publicly
shaming him for refusing to share his code, no? The man has spent the last 25
years perfecting his product and along comes you, acting like you have some
God-given right to inspect its inner workings. Gimme a break.

~~~
hdevalence
> along comes you, acting like you have some God-given right to inspect its
> internals

Well,it's mathematics software, so it's actually really not unreasonable.
Fortunately, the rest of mathematics has moved past the seventeenth-century
style of "Here's my result, the proof is secret". If Mathematica is intended
to be suitable for mathematical research, then its source must be open so that
the results are auditable.

Other mathematics software like Sage doesn't have this problem, and is already
available for the Raspberry Pi for free, obviating the need to use
Mathematica.

~~~
tzs
> If Mathematica is intended to be suitable for mathematical research, then
> its source must be open so that the results are auditable

You don't need source to audit the results. It's a tool, just like a
calculator or a table of logarithms or a table of integrals. If I use an HP
calculator for a calculation, for instance, you don't audit my results by
examining the source for the calculator's firmware and convincing yourself it
is right and then accepting my results. No, you audit my results by doing the
calculation on your Casio calculator and seeing if it comes out the same.

~~~
lutusp
> You don't need source to audit the results.

In fact, you do. Modern computer mathematical results require full exposure,
nothing can be left to the imagination. This is true and understandable.

Going back to the first important computer mathematical result (the solution
to the four-color map conjecture¹ in 1976), to be taken seriously, computer
math results have been required to be fully transparent.

Imagine auditing a cancer cure without knowing anything about the methods or
tools. Same idea.

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem)

~~~
taliesinb
I actually somewhat sympathize with your view. But I think you overstate the
problem: if someone discovers something with Mathematica, they can then
formalize it with an open proof assistant like Coq before they publish, and
modern journals in fact encourage this sort of thing.

Really, it's not a zero-sum-game between open-source and commercial tools.

~~~
jordigh
"Open source" and "commercial" are not antonyms, but people working on
proprietary software think they are.

~~~
comex
Only if you use an overly literal interpretation of "commercial" yet don't use
the literal interpretation of "open source" (since it's also possible to make
source code visible to the public without using a license that would be
considered "open source").

~~~
jlgreco
You have just rediscovered the reason that some people talk about "free
software", and some people talk about "open source".

The sort of access to source code that is being expected here is really no
more than the sort of access that you can get to Windows code. It _really_ is
not an unreasonable expectation.

~~~
comex
No - when most people use the term "open source", they mean something along
the lines of the Open Source Definition
([http://opensource.org/definition](http://opensource.org/definition)), rather
than the literal meaning; this is independent from the distinctions between
open source and free software, which are mostly about philosophy rather than
the set of applicable licenses ([http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-
for-freedom.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-
freedom.html))

I suppose that you, however, do not, which makes what I was trying to say
irrelevant.

------
shared4you
This is why Debian does _not_ recommend Raspberry Pi [0]

> Despite the hype it is a more closed platform than many other things you
> could buy

Claiming to be open, but still encouraging and endorsing non-open-source
software. I was startled to read why R.Pi is unsuitable for education [1]

[0]:
[https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi](https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi)

[1]: [http://whitequark.org/blog/2012/09/25/why-raspberry-pi-is-
un...](http://whitequark.org/blog/2012/09/25/why-raspberry-pi-is-unsuitable-
for-education/)

~~~
mhurron
Given that most educational uses of the Pi won't involved developing things at
such a low level as to require detailed specs of the processor and that the
OS's for the Pi are all freely available that article would probably be better
titled "Why the Pi is unsuitable for educating hardware engineers about ARM."

The $25 price point is more important to the educational use (K-12) then any
specs put out about the hardware. I don't need to know any of that to learn
Python for instance.

~~~
ris
That's a very patronizing attitude. There are a good number of high school
students that are already at the level of reverse engineering drivers.

~~~
SifJar
Yes, and the Raspberry Pi is not designed for them. There is no reason it
should cater to _everyone_ , it's designed for those who _aren 't_ experienced
with programming, hacking and reverse engineering so they can start on their
learning experience without a large financial barrier to entry.

~~~
ris
You're missing my point, which is that high school students are _capable_ of
this kind of thing, and it would be perfectly possible to push yet more of
them along that route given the right environment and attitude.

------
fidotron
Kudos to Wolfram for this.

I do wonder how much pressure they're feeling from the likes of IPython these
days and if that was a motivating factor.

The other part is I don't think I've met a regular Mathematica user that
actually likes it, so this may turn out to be a bad idea!

~~~
nswanberg
IPython is great system for interactive programming, especially for someone
who is familiar with Python and is able to find a complete distribution or
able to set up all the details about their distribution (e.g. avoid problems
like
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6725597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6725597)),
or someone who requires free-as-in-speech software.

I don't use either IPython or Mathematica much, but I would understand
preferring Mathematica over IPython given the choice. Aside from being
younger, IPython is made of a combination of systems without a strong
conceptual glue tying them together. Mathematica is made of a combination of
systems too (kernel written in C, various external libraries in C, Lucene
search engine, etc), but the components are tied together using what I guess
is now called the Wolfram language, where everything, from computations to
settings to notebooks themselves, is specified in Wolfram language
expressions. If you view an IPython file in a text editor you see JSON, which
is different than the language used to compute. If you open a Mathematica
notebook in a text editor you see a nested set of Wolfram language
expressions. Mathematica grew up around that idea.

As a further small example, compare the prompts to the two systems:

    
    
      IPython
      In [1]: 1+2
      Out[1]: 3
    

vs

    
    
      Mathematica
      In[1]:= 1+2
      Out[1]= 3
    

In IPython, the array brackets are just a sort of notation--the assignment
isn't syntactially correct Python. But in Mathematica, you can view that
prompt as assigning the value of an In list at index 1 the expression "1+2".

That sort of consistency holds through the entire system in a way that IPython
can't match.

~~~
doctoboggan
I am not sure if you are aware of this, but you can access the history of
IPython inputs and outputs through the two arrays `In` and `Out`. This prompt
is precisely indicating this.

~~~
nswanberg
Thank you for pointing that out. I meant to show that while they both store
their inputs and outputs in array-like structures, Mathematica does it in a
way that is valid in its own syntax, and IPython does not.

In Mathematica "In[1]:= 1+2" is a syntactially valid expression (though the
literal In symbol is protected), so you could do the following:

    
    
      In[1]:= in[1]:= 1+2
    

and the interpreter would evaluate it (though the values of In[1] and in[1]
would be different).

But even with all of the symbols defined, this is not valid Python (according
to [https://www.pythonanywhere.com/try-
ipython/](https://www.pythonanywhere.com/try-ipython/)):

    
    
      In [1]: in=[]
                                                                                                 
      In [2]: in[0]:1+2                                                                        
        File "<ipython-input-2-b9cd4c9ee15d>", line 1
          in[0]:1+2
               ^
      SyntaxError: invalid syntax
    

The fact that this trivial expression is valid in Mathematica and not in
IPython by itself says nothing about the relative merits of each system.
IPython could be modified to use another notation for the input/output arrays,
and Mathematica would work just as well if it were changed to use some
syntactically incorrect notation. But what I was attempting to show is an
example of how consistent Mathematica is.

------
phonon
You can read Wolfram's post about it here.
[http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/11/21/putting-the-wolfram-
langu...](http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/11/21/putting-the-wolfram-language-and-
mathematica-on-every-raspberry-pi/)

Note that it includes a beta version of the new Wolfram Language!

------
nswanberg
You know who else bundled Mathematica for free?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#Software_applications](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#Software_applications)

------
tomrod
So all I need for a free mathematica install is to spin a virtual machine with
Raspbian?

~~~
liyanage
I would imagine you'd need an ARM-based virtual machine. Perhaps QEMU could do
it.

~~~
liyanage
That said, it sounds like it might be a hassle to get that to work on a Mac.

I got the personal license of Mathematica for Mac a while ago and thought the
price was reasonable for such a powerful system.

The only thing that was driving me nuts is that Mathematica does not work
properly on a Retina display, which of course is a shame as text and graphics
would look gorgeous. Support for that is only planned for the next major
version, according to Wolfram
([http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/a/30104/10565](http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/a/30104/10565)).

I recently found a hacky fix:
[http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/a/21158/10565](http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/a/21158/10565)

With that, Mathematica now looks fantastic on my MacBook Pro's built-in
screen.

~~~
taliesinb
V10 is retina aware, and it's coming out soon.

~~~
liyanage
Given how easy the quick fix is to apply, basic Retina support should really
have been in a free minor-version update to 9, not in a presumably paid
upgrade to 10, after a long wait.

~~~
taliesinb
I believe it required getting rid of some legacy libraries, which couldn't be
achieved in a point release.

------
Create
[http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1mmm02/screenshot_of_f...](http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1mmm02/screenshot_of_fricasaxiom_running_on_my_tiny/)

FriCAS/Axiom running on ARM board (ie. Raspberry Pi) on top of Clozure CL (on
Ubuntu/GNU/Linux)

------
ISL
It has been my hope for many years that Wolfram would open-source Mathematica
one day. I can think of no better way to ensure his legacy.

------
SifJar
seems like buying a Raspberry Pi just became an extremely cheap way to get
Mathematica, then.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Yes, for non-CPU-intensive applications.

~~~
AsymetricCom
I'd run an ARM emulator on top of a x86 stack, but the R-Pi is not just an ARM
machine..

------
ics
So how many Pis can you cluster together to equal the performance of a
standard i3/5/7 laptop (for non-GPU bound calculations)?

~~~
tomrod
That'd be a fun experiment. If only I had disposable income :).

I wonder how much heat these things produce? Could they be used to make an
efficient, small cluster?

~~~
noir_lord
You could make a cluster with them (in fact for none-mathematica uses it has
been done).

Efficient not even remotely the performance per unit of a Raspberry Pi just
makes it not worth it (note: it's worth it if you want to simulate multi-node
programming, SMPP type stuff).

For example a 32 node raspberry pi machine clocked 10.9Gflops on linpack[1],
32 * 35 is $1120 (excluding switches, cabling, power supplies which would add
at least another $200 or so).

A _single_ Nvidia Titan clocks ~1.5 _Teraflops_ in double precession mode for
~$1000 (a performance per dollar rate of 137 times _better_ ).

According to wikipedia[2] a cheap Sempron 145 with 3 Geforce GTX760's at $1090
has a performance of 6.771 teraflops (so over 500 times the performance of the
32 node raspbery pi)

1 [http://www.zdnet.com/build-your-own-supercomputer-out-of-
ras...](http://www.zdnet.com/build-your-own-supercomputer-out-of-raspberry-pi-
boards-7000015831/)

2 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS)

------
thearn4
Cool, but I've been using python+scipy+sympy on a pi for almost a year now. I
think Wolfram is a bit behind the curve.

~~~
flatfilefan
I'm curious, what are you using it for?

------
Someone
Does anybody know what license this is released under? For example, can one
run it under an emulator? On something more powerful than a Pi? Using an ARM-
to-my-CPU jitter (does that work at all, or does Mathematica have its own JIT
inboard?)

If one managed to hack the binaries and include them in an iOS app, would
Wolfram permit that?

~~~
phonon
"...free for anyone to use for personal purposes. (There’s also going to be a
licensing mechanism for commercial uses, other Linux ARM systems, and so on.)"

[http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/11/21/putting-the-wolfram-
langu...](http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/11/21/putting-the-wolfram-language-and-
mathematica-on-every-raspberry-pi/)

~~~
Someone
Thanks. I think the "on the Raspberry Pi" part of the statement in that post
is significant, though. I doubt they will feel fine if someone wrote a clone
of the Mathematica kernel and copied over the notebooks from this release, to
be run on, say, a desktop PC.

------
maxvitek
Try out an emulation and see if you like it. Here is one on OS X.

[http://maxvitek.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/get-mathematica-
on-...](http://maxvitek.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/get-mathematica-on-your-
emulated-raspberry-pi/)

I find that it's fine for most things but slow for visualizations (and you
need an x server running, not making the most of the emulated hardware).

(Can anyone succeed in using this method and then adding it as a remote kernel
to a normal desktop Mathematica session?)

------
flatfilefan
Mathematica being what it is, what are science intensive problems worth
solving on raspberry pi without uploading to a server? I'm thinking along the
lines of robototechnics. Something like calculating a ballistic trajectory for
autonomous gun turret with statistical analysis of precision via feedback
loop. Feedback being the delay of sound of projectile impact for impact
distance. Or visual position of a hit. You get the idea. What can you think of
for civil use?

~~~
damian2000
Given the focus of RPi on teaching school age kids programming, maths
homework.

------
misframer
ARMv6 doesn't support hard float, right? Why would you want to do calculations
on an Pi?

~~~
tokipin
Mathematica can deal with arbitrary-precision numbers (or better said,
Mathematica doesn't blindly use whatever underlying number format is present,
it has precise controls for this sort of thing
[http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/ArbitraryP...](http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/ArbitraryPrecisionNumbers.html))

------
mcguire
Interesting marketing strategy: free is good advertising, but (FWIU) the raspi
doesn't have the horsepower to compete with Wolfram's actual products.

------
runn1ng
Wasn't Raspberry Pi supposed to be free software?

~~~
jordigh
No. That's just marketing hype.

[https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi](https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi)

------
chj
Does it mean a 600MB package on the Raspbian image?

