Introduction to SageMath: a free mathematics software system

Sponsors: SFU KEY Tutte Institute PIMS
Time: June 5, 2017, 11:00-12:00
Location: SFU's Big Data Hub (ASB 10900)
Attendance: Participation in this event is free of charge, but please confirm your attendance
Topic: SageMath is free and open-source mathematical software. Its features cover many aspects of mathematics, from basic arithmetic and calculus to advanced research mathematics in algebra, combinatorics, numerical mathematics, analysis, and number theory.

Its open architecture gives it various distinct advantages over similar sofware, such as Maple, Mathematica, and Magma:

  • It is made for the Cloud, allowing you to use it without installing any software yourself. This makes it ideal for deployment in the classroom. Once you're ready you can also install it as a native application on your own computer.
  • You can easily embed functional code snippets in web pages, allowing you to offer the reader seamless interactive mathematical content and illustrations.
  • Sage is made to interact with other mathematical software, such as R, SciPy, NumPy, Maxima, and many others.
  • Sage is powered by Python, like many other modern mathematical and data science software products such as SciPy, NumPy, matplotlib, and Pandas. Sage is made to work well in the Jupyter notebook. You can use your knowledge of a modern, popular programming language, and the programming experience you gain from Sage is readily transferrable to other environments.

This lecture, part of the week-long workshop WCAG2017 at SFU, provides you with a first introduction into SageMath, so that you can see how SageMath can benefit you.
Program: 11:00 am Lecture: Julian Rüth
12:00 pm Lunch reception
Title: Introduction to SageMath: a free mathematics software system.
Abstract: The SageMath project started in 2004 to create a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab. Since then, a community of hundreds of contributors has built Sage, a tool to perform computations ranging from undergraduate calculus to all kinds of research level mathematics.

This talk is an introduction to Sage. We will start by exploring its Python-powered interface in a tour of its main features. We will then use the CoCalc to run Sage in a web browser; since no local installation is required, this can be a great tool for research (or homework) collaboration or just to jointly work on LaTeX documents. After a quick discussion of ways to integrate Sage with other computer algebra systems, we will finally look at some internals of Sage to see how you could start contributing to Sage.