Some more history: For many years there was a system called Simath, so-called because it was funded by Siemens, based around the research group of Horst Zimmer in Saarbruecken (Germany). Zimmer had lots of students and assistants (finded at least in part by Siemens) who expended a huge amount of effort developing and implementing algorithms in number theory in Simath. They regularly spoke at conferences where they proudly advertised all that Simath could do.
For some reason, Simath had rather few users (I have no idea of the number and do not want to offend anyone, but I myself knew of no number theorists outside Saarbruecken who ever used it). It was "free for academic use". It had lots of documentation, but its very own language. Example: in 1997 I had some elliptic curves defined over quadratic number fields and wanted to know their conductors. No package other than Simath claimed to be able to do that (I wrote Magma's number field Tate's algorithm in about 2005). So I sent my examples to Susanne Schmidt in Saarbruecken (the co-autho with Zimmer of the book "Elliptic Curves: a computational approach") and asked her if Simath could tell me the answers. After rather a while (several days at least) she thanked me for asking since running these examples (small ones, over quadratic fields) had revealed several bugs which had had to be fixed. Eventually Zimmer retired and Siemens stopped the funding, at which point Ken Nakamula in Japan officially took over the Simath project. I have no idea what licensing issues there were, but I don't think Siemens just gave away "their" package and all the code in it. As far as I can tell, that is all lost -- so a huge number of person-years work was for absolutely nothing. A salutory tale! Instead, Ken started NZMATH, and had to start entirely from scratch. I think it was launched at the Dagstuhl meeting in around 2005 (William, you were there I think?). That was pre-Sage, and I remember being sceptical about it ever working. Since then I just assumed that it was withering away. It is rather amazing that it has not. John On 19 May 2010 15:25, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > Here is a paper about NZMATH Version 1.0, which was just posted on the > arxiv today. NZMATH is a project with some overlap in goals in > *number theory* to Sage, which was started around the same time as > Sage. At the beginning -- back in 2005 -- I would say that NZMATH and > Sage had exactly the same goals. > > http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.3153 > > "This is an announcement of the first official release ver.1.0 of a > Python system NZMATH for number theory. We overview all functions in > NZMATH 1.0, show main properties after former report on NZMATH 0.5.0, > and describe new features for stable development. The most important > point of the release is that we can now treat number fields. The > second big change is that new type of polynomial programs are > provided. Elliptic curve primality proving and its related programs > are also available, where we partly use a library outside NZMATH as an > advantage of writing the system only by Python. On method of > development, a new feature is that NZMATH is registered on SourceForge > as an open source project to keep continuous development of the > project. This is a unique attempt among existing systems for number > theory." > > > -- > William Stein > Professor of Mathematics > University of Washington > http://wstein.org > > -- > To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to > sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel > URL: http://www.sagemath.org > -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
