Sage
Timothy Clemans
I am a 17 year old home schooled high school student in Seattle,
Washington and contributor to a Python based open source mathematics
software project called Sage (http://sagemath.org). Onrej Certik,
creator of SymPy (http://sympy.org), suggested that the Sage project
participate in this contest as a Python project. I think that is a
wonderful idea because in the Sage project there are many of
interesting and accessible problems to work on and numerous ways for
pre-university students to contribute time. I would like to get Sage
involved in the contest by introducing Sage, planning Sage
involvement, and writing and supervising tickets. I do not want to be
a contestant.
Sage is a massive extension to Python for all kinds of mathematical
computing. The goal of the Sage project is to develop an open source
alternative to the math software Maple, Mathematica, MATLAB, and
Magma. To achieve this goal in a reasonable amount of time, the Sage
developers did not reinvent the wheel. Instead, the Sage project has
produced a system with a wide range of functionality in less than
three years by maintaining a distribution of the best available math
software and writing a Python library that unifies the software and
libraries and eliminates much of the complexity of many of these
packages for the end users.
Many people first started seriously using Python because of Sage. At
every introductory talk on Sage, the advantages to using Python over
other languages and its popularity are well emphasized. Thanks in
great part to Python, Sage is an excellent system for teaching
students about both math and computer science.
Sage has a web environment called the Sage Notebook, and two free
public notebook servers are available at http://sagenb.com and
http://sagenb.org. A Sage worksheet is similar to a Mathematica
notebook, and although it lacks many of the neat features of Crunchy,
it does provide a fairly robust notebook system. Some of Sage's
features include user accounts, worksheet sharing, tab completion,
infinite loop survival, two and three dimensional graphics,
interactive documentation, and public notebook security.
The Sage Notebook is also an excellent platform for creating
mathematical art. A good example of that is a worksheet called "New
Found Spin" at https://sage.math.washington.edu:8102/home/pub/11/.
Although most of the focus of Sage development is on aiding cutting
edge mathematical research, Sage has good support for elementary
algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. Also, some of Sage's
upper level mathematics functionality is accessible to many high
school and college students. For example, in the summer of 2006, under
the direction of William Stein (lead developer of Sage) 24 talented
high school students used Sage via the notebook in a computer lab to
explore the congruent number problem and in the process were
introduced to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture (http://
wstein.org/simuw06/). Then, in the next summer, another 24 students
used Sage to comprehend Riemann's Hypothesis (http://wstein.org/
simuw/).
I think that there are many ways that pre-university students can
contribute to Sage.
Timothy Clemans
Titus Brown
-> Washington and contributor to a Python based open source mathematics
-> software project called Sage (http://sagemath.org). Onrej Certik,
-> creator of SymPy (http://sympy.org), suggested that the Sage project
-> participate in this contest as a Python project. I think that is a
-> wonderful idea because in the Sage project there are many of
-> interesting and accessible problems to work on and numerous ways for
-> pre-university students to contribute time. I would like to get Sage
-> involved in the contest by introducing Sage, planning Sage
-> involvement, and writing and supervising tickets. I do not want to be
-> a contestant.
Welcome! I've heard good things about Sage, and I'd love to get some
Sage tasks in.
cheers,
--titus
Doug Hellmann
That sounds like an excellent idea! Have a look at the
NewTaskGuidelines (http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-
participation-psf/wiki/NewTaskGuidelines) and think about some
specific tasks you could define for contestants interested in working
with Sage. I see a lot of opportunities for presentations or
screencasts, documentation through examples, integration with other
tools (could Crunchy be integrated with the Notebook?), and testing.
Pick a few ideas and write them up, then send them to this list and
we'll help you refine them and add them to an upcoming batch.
Doug
Andre Roberge
The Sage project sounds like a good one to me.
On Dec 8, 2007 1:10 AM, Timothy Clemans <timothy...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks in
> great part to Python, Sage is an excellent system for teaching
> students about both math and computer science.
+1
> Sage has a web environment called the Sage Notebook, and two free
> public notebook servers are available at http://sagenb.com and
> http://sagenb.org. A Sage worksheet is similar to a Mathematica
> notebook, and although it lacks many of the neat features of Crunchy,
> it does provide a fairly robust notebook system.
From what I understand, Sage is *a lot* more robust than Crunchy. If I
am not mistaken, it does provide a secure environment, so that
it can be run safely on a remote server.
> Some of Sage's
> features include user accounts, worksheet sharing, tab completion,
> infinite loop survival,
This last one is not something Crunchy has. :-(
I will have to look at how Sage is implemented at some point in the near future.
In the mean time, good luck with coming up with tasks for GHOP.
André
>
> Timothy Clemans
> >
>