
Computational Mathematics with SageMath (2018) - lainon
http://sagebook.gforge.inria.fr/english.html
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williamstein
I didn't post this item, but I am the person that started SageMath in 2004, so
if anybody has any questions I will try to answer them...

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1_000_000
Maybe I misremember horribly, but I think I read somewhere that the original
motivation for staring Sage was to provide an open source alternative to the
proprietary tools. Do you still think it is an ideal worth of following?

And Sage has been (and is!) huge undertaking, which developments of the
project surprised you most? Which parts of it you like most and which least?

In the name of many, many users thank you for starting it!

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williamstein
Yes, our official mission statement is still "Creating a viable free open
source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab." Yes, I think this
is still worth aspiring to, though it's very difficult to do with very limited
financial support (given how much money the Ma's have).

> which developments of the project surprised you most?

It was dramatically more difficult to get real funding than I expected. I
remember my first NSF grant asking for funding directly for Sage, where I put
in what I thought was a humble request for about 10% of what Magma operates
with... and they cut everything except one single 50% postdoc. I definitely
thought the math community would support development of a community owned
platform for computational mathematics much more strongly, and was extremely
surprised when that was not the case. Europe has been much more supportive
(with OpenDreamKit), but I'm in the US.

That said, I'm also very pleasantly surprised that actual contributions to
Sage have continued and grown in many areas of mathematics, and the project is
successful and healthy today and supporting research level mathematics in many
areas.

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piemonkey
I made extensive use of Sage during a recent research project. The most useful
thing about Sage for me is that it integrates cleanly many mathematical
libraries, making it easy to export results from one tool into the other. The
visualization tools are a bonus, and made debugging quite easy. In my case,
Sage neatly connected graph isomorphism tools with group theory libraries,
saving me a tremendous amount of work.

The main downside for me is the performance overhead of using Sage. It is
great for quickly prototyping ideas, but I found that some components were not
designed with performance in mind. For instance, I used the Sage interface for
Gap for much of my group theory computations, and I found that this interface
was incomplete (it does not natively support the product replacement
algorithm, for example) and quite leaky (I needed to manually garbage collect
to keep from running out of memory).

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alexbecker
Sage is definitely not the easiest thing to use, but it's a great way to 1)
actually get your math right and 2) record and share your work. I used it to
work out the cubic formula and share it alongside a blog post:
[https://alexcbecker.net/mathematics.html#the-quadratic-
equat...](https://alexcbecker.net/mathematics.html#the-quadratic-equation-and-
beyond)

