A very short introduction to Sage

[Fernando Gouvea]

I'm in the final stages of writing a book on infinite series for calculus students. (I claim my way to do it is better than what you find in standard textbooks.) I use Sage throughout, but only very simple stuff. Most of my students use SageMath Cell and find that more than adequate for what they need.

To help them, I wrote a short appendix with a very quick introduction to Sage. I attach the current version here. If you find any errors or absurd statements (and you care enough), could you let me know? Probably a direct email to me is better than cluttering the list with this.

Thanks,

Fernando

-- 
=============================================================
Fernando Q. Gouvea         http://www.colby.edu/~fqgouvea
Carter Professor of Mathematics
Dept. of Mathematics
Colby College              
5836 Mayflower Hill        
Waterville, ME 04901       

We believe that all religions are basically the same,
at least the one that we read was.
They all believe in love and goodness.
They only differ on matters of
creation sin heaven hell God and salvation.
  -- from "Creed", by Steve Turner

[Nils Bruin]

Nice work!

For saving images of 3d-pictures: In the jupyter notebook with the "threejs" viewer you can click on the "i" in the lower right corner. That gets you a menu from which you  can "sage as png". It will save a snapshot of what you're viewing. You can also get camera and viewpoint from that menu, but I don't know what you can then do with that.

3d plots also have a "save_image" method that can save the image. Of course, choosing the camera point is rather essential for getting a nice picture. I'm not sure if we now finally have options for setting camera position and direction (and viewport angle) that influence the picture generated by save_image.