Hello! I am a mathematician as well as a programmer and have been very interested in Sage for many years, it has inspired me over the years to make various calculator type projects. You are going to love my new one which I am preparing to release, promise! Thanks so much for all your hard work I have followed your career.
I have almost completely finished a visualization block coding system which sits on top of Numpy, Scipy, and Sage designed to help kids who are learning math on youtube, to be able to create "problem set" style save files which can be shared to supplement math education videos, and to create animations for my upcoming youtube channel for math education. It also has a fully functional debugger and console, its like web inspector but for math, so I have named it Math Inspector.
I think it's really exciting what is happening in the world of math education and the way that the medium of video is being used for the first time to communicate the joy of mathematics to the world, especially to young people. It's revolutionary. My goal has been to create a tool which enables people to be able to interact with Sage without needing to even know python at all. I wish you the best!
I'm doing some research on ed-tech tools and helping students learn by creating and experimenting! I'd love to check out your tool and talk to you about it, but I see no way to contact you! Could you add a email or Twitter handle to your profile, or you could contact me, my details are on my HN user page.
I prefer to only correspond with serious mathematicians, and for fun recently I have been using Sage to work through Mochizuki's paper on Inter-universal Teichmüller theory, I got a little stuck on this passage, if you can explain it to me I will tell you more about my project:
"In the first three papers of the series, we introduced and studied the theory surrounding the log-theta-lattice, a highly non-commutative two-dimensional diagram of “miniature models of conventional scheme theory”, called Θ±ell NF-Hodge theaters, that were associated, in the first paper of the series, to certain data, called initial Θ-data. This data includes an elliptic curve EF over a number field F , together with a prime number l ≥ 5. Consideration of various properties of the log-theta-lattice led naturally to the establishment, in the third paper of the series, of multiradial algorithms for constructing “splitting monoids of LGP-monoids”.
Just Kidding!!!!! I sent you an email =) Thanks so much for your interest in this project, looking forward to hearing more about what you are working on as well. Cheers!
Just want to say thanks. Sage is the best thing that exists when it comes to creating a proof of concept in a cryptographic attack. I’ve used your thing for years and pretty much everyone in the cryptanalysis field use it. Good job.
I think sage should advertise more that it can be viewed as a big library + modified but compatible python 2, i.e. all your weird file parsers just work. I am looking forward a lot to finally get python 3 compatibility, for that reason (write as much of my code as possibly to run on cpython as well, not just sage-python; possibility of using stuff where only python 3 bindings exist).
FWIW, although there are no binary releases that include Python 3 yet, if you build from scratch with ./configure --with-python=3 you can use Sage with Python 3 and you'll find that the vast majority of stuff works (though with no promises).
Hi William! I'm a paying customer at CoCalc, and I'm grateful for the amazing tools, great community and amazing team you have built! Keep up the great work!
I will join the chorus in saying thanks. It’s not perfect, and for me it was complementary to Mathematica, but I defended my dissertation in 2013 and need to revisit.
It attacks a hard, hard problem and I’m super happy that it will eventually replace Mathematica so that anyone who wishes can see how the black box works.
So I used Sage a lot when I was an undergraduate, but now use anything else available because the Debian Archive never seems to have a working sagemath package (eg, I just typed "sagemath" into my terminal right now and got a crash on initilisation).
Something seems a bit weird about that to me, because when I used it ~8 years ago Sage was great and none of the features I care about changed.
Do can I get a meta-comment on why Sage might struggle to get packaged for Debian in the way that, eg, Octave/maxima/R/etc do?
Scientific software has strong dependencies on the specific versions of software used. The debian package needs to play nice with a couple of hundred packages which are not the ones sage is building against upstream.
In sage 5.x the source code was quite small compared to today and could be patched with some effort. Today the project is huge and this would be impossible for one person to do.
It's vastly easier to just install sage using their own scripts from source and have some libraries duplicated. The sage source code build script is one of the simplest to use.
The problem is that sage actually depends on Octave, Maxima, R and many other packages. It parses binary output of many dependencies and often needs the exact version it expects because of that. It also has relatively brittle doctests testing everything an as a result often breaking on minor changes in dependencies.
I've been looking at how wiki frameworks of today are really separated from data processing and mathenatics. I'm wondering if Sage could be used to solve arbitrary equations and output data that can then be graphed customely, something like how wolframalpha can take any equation and allows manipulation of data sets.
I'm a software engineer that has an MS in Math (ABD actually). I was good at analysis and differential geometry. Any parts of the codebase/deployment I would be best suited to contribute to?
I made this comment below, but about 6 or so years ago, I found it could be used for science and engineering purposes like solving ODEs but it seemed a little bit rough at that. Today, is it improved for use for science types? Do Sage and Cocalc find users in this area?
I am a pure mathematician (number theorist) and the vast majority of the 600+ Sage developers over the years come from research mathematics. We generally view the numerical python ecosystem (numpy, scipy, pandas, etc.) as the place where development on engineering code happens for Python. So Sage itself isn't directly better for engineering, but I think the Python ecosystem has overall improved during the last six years...
