polymake interface merged in 8.0.beta1; needs users, developers for integrating polymake features

[Matthias Koeppe]

polymake (https://polymake.org/doku.php) is an excellent, mature, and actively maintained open source system for interactive computations in polyhedral geometry (and matroids, tropical geometry, ...), developed since 1997 by Ewgenij Gawrilow and Michael Joswig and various contributors (https://polymake.org/doku.php/team).

Thanks to the work by Simon King during Sage Days 84 (https://wiki.sagemath.org/days84), there is now a pexpect-based interface to polymake in Sage. The spkg for polymake is also up to date, packaging the recently released version 3.1. Several follow-up tickets have added data conversion to polymake objects via polymake(x) and from polymake objects via x.sage(); and a backend for the Polyhedron class using polymake. The latter, in particular, offers fast computations for polyhedra over quadratic fields.

These tickets have been merged in version 8.0.beta1. See https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/22710 for a meta-ticket that is tracking polymake-related development.

Now users and developers are needed who help to integrate polymake's features fully into Sage. With little effort, Sage can now become the go-to system for polyhedral computation (and perhaps other areas such as tropical geometry); on the other hand, Sage will help expand the user base of polymake by introducing the powerful features that polymake offers to a new set of users.

[saad khalid]

Hello! Thank you for your post! I was just a bit confused, in what ways can people help? Thanks!