Sage Days 95: Women In Sage

July 9-13, 2018, Montréal, Canada

Target Audience

The Women in SageMath Days aim to initiate women from various backgrounds to SageMath use and development, as well as to build networks between established users of mathematical software and mathematicians with potential to use such software. We do not focus on any specific area of mathematics and want to involve women at all career stages, including undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers and faculty members. Women working in industry are also welcome to apply.

The choice to aim this event only at women was made because most developers are men, but also because we noticed intimidating attitudes from experienced men in other workshops. Even though these behaviours were probably unconscious, they have an impact on the confidence of female mathematicians when come the time of coding. To create a friendly environment, we plan to host the workshop in a rented house. Such circumstances foster longstanding connections between the participants. Because women form a minority of mathematicians, building broad and strong networks helps them to overcome the obstacles typically occurring on their career path.

Invited speakers

• Tania Allard is a research software engineer at the University of Sheffield (UK). She works with researchers to improve their code and to communicate them the general carpentry of a software. She knows well the infrastructure behind SageMath and is a partner of the European OpenDreamKit project, that aims to develop open-source pieces of software for research in mathematics.

• Jennifer Balakrishnan is a number theorist and Assistant Professor at Boston University (MA) and has organized several SageMath Days. She gives good talks about the use of SageMath for number theorists, and is also knowledgeable about the use of SageMath for other parts of mathematics.

• Emily Gunawan is a postdoctoral researcher in algebra and combinatorics at University of Connecticut (CT) and is deeply involved in the Sage-Combinat development. She will talk about the implementation of frieze patterns in SageMath.

Projects

• TBD

Accommodations:

• The workshop will be held in a rented house in the Montréal area. The precise location will be announced later.

Schedule:

The workshop will last five days and will focus on software development. The schedule includes four plenary talks:

• Best practices for computational science and research, given by Tania Allard (University of Sheffield, UK)

• SageMath for number theory (even for non-number theorists), given by Jennifer Balakrishnan (Boston University, MA)

• Implementation of Conway-Coxeter frieze patterns and related topics, given by Emily Gunawan (University of Connecticut, CT)

Since one of the goal is to develop the abilities of the participants, there will be every day coding sprints on elaborated projects. Participants will work in teams created according to their interests. We also plan some time for tutorials and proposed presentations in function of the needs. Each day will end with a status report session. Finally, we want to organize during the week a challenge where teams will compete to conquer coding exercises. Since the workshop will be held in a rented house, the activities will be both during the days and evenings. Therefore, some time will also be dedicated to team-building activities.

A more precise schedule will be announced later.

Organizers:

• Nadia Lafrenière (PhD student at Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada)
• Élise Vandomme (Postdoc at Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada)