sd2-stein-status

SAGE Days 2: SAGE: Status Report

A talk for the SAGE Days 2 workshop, by William Stein.

Here are my slides: http://modular.math.washington.edu/talks/2006-10-07-sagedays2/

• The purpose of this workshop:

  • lots of strategy, planning, brainstorming, etc.
• Funding ideas:
  • NSF Grants:
    • Computational Math program

    • CSUMS (http://sage.math.washington.edu/grants/stein-csums-06/)

  • The SAGE Mathematics Foundation
  • Parallel SAGE push
• Mercurial revision control system: why? what? how? -- a very quick tour

• Python 2.5 (see http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/whatsnew25.html)

  • list indices: __index__ method; This means n=2; [1,2,3,4][n] works!!

    • This was implemented by Travis Oliphant (author of NumPy), since NumPy also has specialized integers.

  • big lists lists with more than 2^{32} elements now supported

  • optimizations -- "Several of the optimizations were developed at the NeedForSpeed sprint, an event held in Reykjavik, Iceland, from May 21-28 2006." E.g., "Exception handling in Python 2.5 is therefore about 30% faster than in 2.4."

  • memory -- memory is now freed

  • ctypes -- ctypes is included standard

  • conditional expressions: x = true_value if condition else false_value

  • context managers: relevant to all the discussion about precision lately: http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/pep-343.html

  • any and all -- new mathy builtins:

   sage: any(is_prime(x) for x in range(114,125))
   False
   sage: all(is_prime(x) for x in prime_range(50,100))
   True

• Recent additions to SAGE:
  • GSL: GNU Scientific Library
  • Twisted: Networking framework
  • Macaulay2: optional package that builds from source
• Upcoming events that are relevant to SAGE development:
  • October 23-27: I'm speaking about SAGE at an IMA "Software in Algebraic Geometry" in Minnesota later this month.
  • Nov 5-11: Me at CCR
  • Dec 3-4, 2006: Me at Waterloo

  • Jan 29-Feb 2: MSRI Interactive Parallel Computation ---> SAGE

  • March 10-14, 2007: Arizona Winter School (I'm at co-organizer). David Savitt (here) is the organizer.
  • June 3-8, 2007: Banff workshop on modular forms computation -- I'm an organizer
  • July 30-Aug 3, 2007: AIM: Workshop on Modular Forms and L-functions -- I'm an organizer
  • Plans:
    • SAGE 2.0: fast arithmetic
    • SAGE 3.0: parallel
    • Along the way: modular forms, elliptic curves, groebner basis, quaternion algebras, etc. -- what people want
  • Home improvement -- extreme edition --- Let's build the car!