Dear sage developers, some people, including myself, believe that Sage should contain more tools for topology. E.g., there was a thread http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/5bd11c7e9fe08e4c/6ba64c41dd86770e?lnk=gst&q=simplicial+complexes#6ba64c41dd86770e about simplicial complexes and their homology.
John Palmieri has sent a post to some algebraic topology list (https:// lists.lehigh.edu/mailman/listinfo/algtop-l), pointed the people to Sage and asked for contribution. Thank you, John! Being subscriber of that list, I added that one way to contribute is to point us to existing software packages. So far, there was one answer (concerning "plex", see below). My question: How should the work on inclusion of topology software be organized? Should one open a single trac ticket (essentially complaining that there is not enough topology around), on which suggestions for inclusions are collected? Or should the collection be on this thread, with one separate ticket for each suggestion? Here are three suggestions: 1. Simplicial complexes / Homology (see thread above) I asked Frank Lutz, and he said that Polymake had a module 'topaz' that can compute homology. However, in a recent Polymake upgrade, topaz was removed from the distribution, due to some compiler problem. So, it might make sense to wait for on upgrade of topaz. 2. SnapPea SnapPea is a program for creating and studying hyperbolic 3-manifolds (http://www.geometrygames.org/SnapPea-old/index.html). It seems to be widely used by computational topologists. AFAIK it can deal with ideal triangulations, compute volume, has a census of hyperbolic manifolds, can also work with hyperbolic knots, etc. If I understand correctly, it is under GNU GPL and may be used as a Python module. 3. Plex (suggestion of Ryan Lewis from the above-mentioned topology list) Plex is a software package for computing persistent homology of finite simplicial complexes, often generated from point cloud data (http:// comptop.stanford.edu/programs/jplex/index.html). 4. I found a link to a list of topology related software: http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~nmd/computop/ Some of these might be interesting. I am not sure if Plex really is an option for Sage. Previous versions were written for Matlab. The current version is written in Java and can also run in a standalone mode, using an integrated Java interpreter, called Beanshell. Dunno if that works for Sage. Cheers, Simon --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
