POEMA learning week 2: Day 1

Today we had a half day but productive one. The speaker Benoît Legat lead us through the jungle of code relating to polynomial optimization using Julia before jumping into examples. In particular we did a rather deep dive into SumOfSquares.jl a sub package of  JuMP.

At first glance there is staggering amount of packages for polynomial in the relatively young language of Julia. Upon some reflection, it is clear why. Just as new cities use the ruins of their predecessors as foundation so too code is written on the failings of previous code. In the case of software the cycle of innovation and improvement is much faster. Keeping up-to-date is hard work. Navigating the jungle of old and new code is no small feat for the new and uninitiated. Fortunately we now have this lecture to guide use a bit in understanding how polynomial optimization fits into the larger Julia/Jump ecosystem.

In code, and perhaps math in general it is good to have a minimal viable example when introducing new information. However, care has to be taken as the wrong example can just as easily confuse as elucidate. A way around this is just to have many examples. Today we were given a cornucopia of examples in the SumOfSquares.jl Documentation.

To concluded, I now have a better understanding of the polynomial optimization packages out there in the wild and I have a whole bag of new code examples to try.