Hi Gustav, On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Gustav Delius <gustav.del...@gmail.com> wrote: > > This is indeed a very interesting idea. Luckily something like this > already exists, except that it is not using the whole of Sage but only > Maxima. Take a look at stack.bham.ac.uk.
I remember reading about STACK in 2008, but probably that was something else. Thank you for refreshing my memory, and pointing out the URL. I think I haven't clearly explained my application area. With regards to symbolic maths, Maxima is very matured as far as I know. However, when I tried to study undergraduate cryptography using Maxima, there lies a problem. It was very difficult as a beginner to both learn the crypto theory and experiment with it using Maxima. At least in cryptography, I think Sage just makes me happy. And for that, I thank Martin Albrecht, David Kohel, among other contributors to the crypto module of Sage. The other things I find interesting are elliptic curves and number theoretic cryptosystems. In the context of an undergraduate crypto lab session, one can use Maple to study the RSA cryptosystem and design exercises to get students to factorize "large" integers in breaking variants of RSA, e.g. Koblitz's kid crypto. But using Maple for factorization in such a lab session doesn't fully convey to students the necessity of time and speed in modern number theoretic cryptosystems. Pari/GP is very good at this sort of thing and some maths educators have used it to teach crypto within number theory courses. For example, William Stein during his time at Harvard University, and I think John Grove at The University of Melbourne. Having said that, I know that at least someone has used both Axiom and Maxima in teaching undergraduate crypto: @inproceedings{McAndrew_2008, author = {Alasdair McAndrew}, title = {Teaching cryptography with open-source software}, booktitle = {SIGCSE}, year = {2008}, pages = {325-329}, crossref = {DBLP:conf/sigcse/2008}, } @proceedings{DBLP:conf/sigcse/2008, editor = {J. D. Dougherty and Susan H. Rodger and Sue Fitzgerald and Mark Guzdial}, title = {Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE 2008, Portland, OR, USA, March 12--15, 2008}, booktitle = {SIGCSE}, publisher = {ACM}, year = {2008}, } -- Regards Minh Van Nguyen --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---