This is very incorrect. Sage's website accurately describes it: "It combines the power of many existing open-source packages into a common Python-based interface. Mission: Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab."

There is an additional benefit that is crucial to research mathematicians: the source code can be peer reviewed and checked for correctness.

I don't think there is any confusion. The article linked to in the submission specifically mentions wikipedia by name. Didn't you read it?

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding in this thread about what MathML is for. What we are wanting, what we need, is for modern browsers to support the rendering of mathematics. To even get off the ground, we need a markup language for the browser to interpret. Since browsers already know how to speak XML, it only makes sense for the markup to be some flavor of XML. Those who are suggesting LaTeX instead are really missing the point here. We aren't solve the problem of a lack of human writable markup. That problem has been solved many times over. The problem we are trying to solve is rendering mathematics in the browser. Period. THAT is what we need MathML support for.

Again, the problem is NOT a problem of AUTHORSHIP. Authorship is easy. It's a problem of DISPLAY. And it is a serious and important problem to be solved. The web was invented to share scientific information. Education on the web is huge--and growing. Academic publishers, mathematical software, and software shims that display math in a browser all use MathML extensively. It's a ubiquitous technology precisely because it fills a need in the industry, and it fills it well. What's more, MathML is important for an accessible web.

PDF is clearly not good enough for digital consumption. PDF is great for print but totally sucks for screens. MathJax is amazing (as are the people behind it), but it is a huge, complicated, and inefficient solution to the problem of math in the browser. The author of the linked article in the submission works on MathJax professionally and is advocating MathML support in the browser. That should tell you something. (In fact, MathJax itself uses MathML both internally and as an input/output format.)

That's because you don't know what it's for. MathML is what you get when you try to do translate the expressiveness of LaTeX into the domain of HTML/XML. You should ask yourself why it is that the very same people who work on a tool that you this is good, namely LaTeX, are the people who developed MathML, which you think is bad. If you are writing MathML by hand, you are doing it wrong.

Well, except for the RAM upgrade.

Stanley Milgram's "small-world experiment" suggests that people in the United States are connected by three friendship links, on average: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_experiment.

Your reply is absolute nonsense. Professors have always been bad teachers. How could that possibly be responsible for a decline in student knowledge retention?

I am a university professor. What you are witnessing is the disintegration of American secondary education. We have seen a dramatic decline in the preparation of incoming freshman. Even strong students who are very prepared on paper have major and substantial gaps in their education. Professors are struggling to manage this situation. Do you teach to the students in a way that will maximize their learning? Or do you teach the course content at a level consistent with your own notion of academic integrity and what the course catalog lists as the content of the course? Do you somehow split the difference, or if so, how? These are the questions we are trying to answer.

I don't know the legal ins and outs. It sure does seem stupid to me. But the fact is, iPads and iPhones have a significant market share and are otherwise great products. I want to write software for it, but Apple is keeping me for including GPLed mathematics software, and that's frustrating.

As a mathematician and hobbyist iOS developer, it really sucks that so much great mathematics software is GPLed. You can't port Octave, for example, to the iPad as its license is incompatible with Apples terms. I'd love to see this kind of stuff on my iPad. I'd even write it myself! But nope... A few great non-GPLed mathematics packages that have made their way into the iOS ecosystem. There's a Reduce implementation, for example, that looks really nice.

And while I'm rambling (sorry), LaTeX on mobile is just in shambles. I mean, it's in shambles on the desktop, too, but it's nearly impossible to do on mobile. It needs a rewrite. Period. But the mobile dev community has done a really great job getting as far as possible with what we have with LaTeX.