On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 3:26 AM, David Joyner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I like it but perhaps I am prejudiced:-) IMHO, SAGE would be dead (or at > least > a very lonely research project) if it weren't for the fact that it is > free and open source.
Sage would certainly not be dead even if I were the only user -- in fact I was the only person behind Sage for a while. Incidentally, the *Python* community in Boston, MA was in fact very interested in Sage from day 1; that made a big big difference in getting Sage off the ground. > But also, design is an important factor. > > Some ideas (I hesitate to call them suggestions since it seems fine as is): > 1. replace "notable community" by specific growth (as in derivative) numbers. > 2. replace "interfaces to all exisiting..." by something specific like > "well-designed > command-line interface to Python, GAP, ..." (You can't say everything > in 2 pages but > I personally love the tabbed history and completion of the IPython interface > and saw it wasn't mentioned.) > 3. A specific example could be mentioned which smoothly integrates several > systems. As Michael B suggests, a group invariant computation in a number > field mixes GAP (for groups), Pari for the number field (is this correct?), > and > Singular (for the polynomial ring invariant theory computations). > > I will demo computation and visualization of modular abelian varieties during my talk, and keep the above suggestions in mind. Computing modular abelian varieties brings together numerous components of Sage, and is exactly the functionality I started Sage for. It's fairly technical, but not impossibly so (it's just homology groups of modular curves, which are compact Riemann surfaces, etc.) > > On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 1:57 AM, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Hi, > > > > I'm giving a plenary talk at ISSAC in Linz, Austria this summer. I'm > supposed > > to write a 2-page "abstract/paper" for the proceedings. I just wrote > something: > > > > http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/was/tmp/abstract.pdf > > > > I've been advised by some people on this list to focus on algorithms in > Sage > > and purely technical things, but I've totally ignored that advice and > instead > > written something very social in which I as honestly as possible lay out > exactly > > why Sage exists and try to describe somewhat just what Sage is. > > > > I have to submit this in a couple days, but comments are welcome. > > > > -- William > > > > -- > > William Stein > > Associate Professor of Mathematics > > University of Washington > > http://wstein.org > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---