[Axiom-developer] Re: Axiom + High Energy Physics

[C Y]

--- Bob McElrath <address@hidden> wrote:

> Cernlib certainly contains mathematical routines.
> 
> However it contains a very large number of things which are not
> mathematical routines, and it is written in fortran.

I thought it was being ported to C?  Did that not happen?
 
> A much more appropriate library for interfacing is the GNU Scientific
> Library, BLAS, and LAPACK.  Taken together these cover almost all of
> the cernlib routines.  Anything it does not cover should be added to
> them, rather than imported from cernlib.  ;)

Of course, ideally we'd document and implement all the algorithms in
Axiom as literate code ;-).  Although I understand BLAS and LAPACK in
particular do a lot of low level optimization work I for one would not
care to repeat...

> Besides, the data analysis package root (root.cern.ch) has superceded
> cernlib.

Ah, good to know.
 
> They would.  People tend to (rightfully) distrust such packages, and
> the learning curve is high, so people tend to continue using what 
> they know.

Since the idea would be to re-implement Feyncalc hopefully the learning
curve wouldn't be too terribly high, but I suppose the realistic view
would suggest differently.

Bob, being a member of a physics department and a user of cernlib and
friends, what would you recommend as a way to ensure and demonstrate
the reliability of such packages?  (I suppose me getting a Phd in High
Energy Physics would be the best first step, but that's probably not
really practical...)  The only way I can think of is to make some kind
of feyncalc_examples.pamphlet which reproduces every published result
of Feyncalc on Mathematica, which might be good for a paper but may or
may not convince people.  Would sure make for great bug testing though,
regardless (/me scribbles note to look for published Feyncalc results
on todo list...)

> But of course I think such an effort is still worthwhile.

Heh - perhaps the chance to avoid spending large fractions of the
department budget on CAS software will help convince folks to to debug
and test the new arrival.

> > I'm sort of hoping Axiom might someday become the tool of
> > choice for theoretical physics - 
> 
> Me too!  ;)

In your estimation, are the mathematical abilities of Axiom as it
currently exists enough to support Feyncalc, or are we lacking
something essential?  (Disregard if you don't use Feyncalc, of course
;-)

Cheers,
CY


        
                
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