On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 8:49 PM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 6:13 PM, Dox <o.castillo.felis...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi people! >> As some of you may know I'm a physicist. One of my complains to >> Mathematica is the lack of an easily usable tensor package, specially >> for those (like me) interested in General Relativity calculations. >> >> Does a package like that exist in Sage? > > There are numerous packages for Mathematica for doing tensor calculus. > I can't comment on whether or not they are "easily usable" (is any > interesting mathematics or physics "easy"?). Here's an example of > one of those packages: http://www.math.washington.edu/~lee/Ricci/ > > In 2006 and 2007 various people investigated writing tensor calculus > packages for Sage, but in the end nothing came of this. I think > there is maybe something in Maxima, which is included in Sage, but it > is nowhere as sophisticated as what is available for Mathematica. > > My third-hand understanding from people I talked with about this was > the Mathematica language/system was in fact particularly well suited > for tensor calculus. > > William
The author of Ricci sent this to me. I don't know if it will go through to the list, so I've copied it here: "It's true, Mathematica is a great system for writing packages to do tensor calculations, and I found it to be very useful when I wrote my Ricci package. But I have to warn you that there are lots of capabilities that you'll probably want, which Ricci doesn't have. The most glaring lack is the ability to define a specific metric tensor in coordinates and calculate the corresponding curvature tensor. This, among other things, is something that I've long intended to add to Ricci, but so far it hasn't happened. Jack Lee _______________________________________________ John M Lee, Professor of Mathematics University of Washington Mathematics Department, Box 354350 Seattle, WA 98195-4350 l...@math.washington.edu, 206-543-1735 http://www.math.washington.edu/~lee " -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en.
