In-Jae, I'm forwarding my reply to sage-support and sage-edu, two mailing lists that are dedicated to helping people use Sage. To others on the list: please feel free to respond to "Why do I use Sage over (or with) other commercial software" and how you use Sage in teaching.
Kim, In-Jae wrote: > Hello Jason, > > I have a question on SAGE. > Have you used SAGE for undergrad or grad courses? > Yes, both. I am currently using it in Calc 2 and differential equations for in-class calculations, plots, etc. I am in the process of setting up a math department sage server, which will then have student accounts and they will be able to do their work on the server, if they want. I will also distribute some in-class notes on the server and work out some questions that students ask on the server. > If you have, could you let me know for what courses you used, and how you > used it in those courses? > I've used it in calc 2, calc 3, linear algebra, differential equations, and an early graduate research course. I am preparing a talk on our experiences using it in the graduate course. Basically, we used it to collaboratively write programs that calculated things about the minimum rank problem. There were several unique things about Sage that made it particularly suited for this, more than other commercial software programs. My abstract is: This talk will discuss the use of Sage in a course designed to involve first and second-year graduate students in research. In this case, none of the students or the professor had had prior experience with Sage. Students collaborated using Sage and the included NetworkX package to investigate the minimum rank problem in combinatorial matrix theory. Various features of Sage (e.g., the included NetworkX package, the N.I.C.E. graph automorphism functionality, the online notebook interface, Cython integration, etc.) made Sage more useful than other commercial math software that was tried. In addition, the free nature of Sage made it more desirable for sharing research with other mathematicians since the mathematicians working on the problem do not all have access to the same commercial software. The results and source code of the research will be submitted as a paper soon. After the course, several students are continuing to use Sage in their other courses and one is planning to use Sage heavily in her masters thesis. > Could you also give me a brief statemnet for strength of SAGE compared to > Mathematica or Maple? > It depends on the area, so you'll have to give me an area to get a more specific answer. In general, Sage has somewhat weaker general symbolic capabilities (i.e., integrals, etc.) than mathematica or maple (though usually this does not seem to be a problem in undergraduate-level problems). It has *much* stronger number theory functionality. Things are object-oriented in Sage and Sage understands mathematical structures and how they relate (using category theory). For example, Sage knows what a vector space is, what a finite field is, etc. You can actually create a finite field or an extension of the rationals and ask questions about it. You can create a polynomial ring over a field and then just work with it. Sage is also generally faster than either Mathematica or Maple, in my experience. The web interface to Sage is a huge plus to Sage over mathematica and maple. Of course, being free and open-source is something that is unmatched in either Mathematica or Maple; that is a very important point that is sometimes overlooked. You can literally see what is going on inside of Sage, where you have to guess what is happening in Mathematica or Maple. One reason that Sage was chosen for an AIM workshop on helping undergraduate research was that the participants didn't have a common computational system (i.e., some had access to Mathematica, some had access to Maple, some had access to neither). They could use Sage because it was free, whereas it would have been problematic to insist that every person somehow acquire access to a specific piece of commercial software. Related to this, I had a student complain on my course evaluations about me using Mathematica in class because it is hard for our students here to have access to Mathematica, and they would have to pay in order to use it at home, etc. If you are teaching future secondary ed teachers, then they most likely will not have access to Maple or Mathematica when they are teaching high school because of the cost. However, they *will* have access to Sage, so using Sage directly benefits their future students because whatever they learn can be used in their high school classes. Another huge plus to Sage, in my eyes, is that it is based on one of the most prevalent and easiest-to-use computer languages around, Python. Students that learn to use Mathematica and Maple learn a language that they, in most likelyhood, will never use once they graduate. However, Python is used in many, many industries, so their python knowledge from using Sage is directly applicable later on. Those are a few things that came to my mind right away. After some time thinking about it, I probably will have other things that make Sage more effective for me than other commercial software. Thanks, Jason --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-support@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-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
