Date: Thursday May 8, 2025
Location: Math West WMC 2800-2830
Webpage: https://www.cecm.sfu.ca/~nbruin/compday/
Registration: The event is free but registration is required. Please register by April 23 by filling out THIS SURVEY.
Organizer/contact: Nils Bruin, nbruin@sfu.ca
Description: This event consists of several presentations and tutorials that will help you to be more efficient and productive in your mathematical research.
Modern mathematical research uses computational tools in many ways: You use computers to typeset your results in the form of an article, report, poster, or presentation slides. You will also use computers to archive and keep track of your work and to share it with your collaborators and supervisor. Furthermore, there are various advanced (and some experimental!) software packages that can do advanced and complicated computations for you, in a way similar to how you used a graphing calculator for basic problems in high school. This event consists of several presentations and tutorials that show you some of these tools and how to use them. You will also have opportunities to try them yourself.
The exact offerings and schedule will be tuned closer to the event, with input from the participants. The proposed tutorials below are preliminary. They may be changed or cancelled depending on interest.
What's new in Maple by Michael Monagan
Maple is a comprehensive software package for doing mathematics which is available to SFU faculty and graduate students. Every year Maplesoft adds new mathematical capabilities to Maple. Some have been contributed by SFU students and faculty, for example, the GraphTheory package, the Groebner basis engine and a new polynomial factorization algorithm. I will describe and demo the new mathematical capabilities in Maple added in the last 6 years.
An introduction to Macaulay2 by Nathan Ilten
Macaulay2 is a computer algebra system designed specifically for researchers in algebraic geometry, the study of solution sets of systems of polynomial equations. I will provide an elementary introduction to Macaulay2. We will begin by discussing basic objects such as rings, fields, and ideals, and basic operations such as ideal containment and polynomial factorization. I will then recall the notion of free resolutions and show how to work with them in Macaulay2.
This presentation should be suitable for anyone who has taken Math 340 (Rings and Fields).
Using Jupyterlab for mathematical experiments by Nils Bruin
The computational tasks that you encounter in mathematical research range from simple calculator-type computations to large-scale, multi-processor runs of complicated programs. You tend to spend most time somewhere in the middle, where you have a somewhat complicated set of computations that you are amending and correcting interactively. The notebook environment is the most convenient for this type of computation. Jupyter provides such a notebook environment for many computational software packages, including Ptyhon (with Pandas, SciPy, Numpy, etc.), Sagemath, Magma, Julia, etc.
This tutorial will show you the features of Jupyter that may be useful for you, show you some ways of getting access to Jupyter. We will also discuss some general strategies to move smoothly from experimentation to more general code and for migrating code out of notebooks and into other formats more suitable for production use.
| Time | WMC 2810 | WMC 2820 | WMC 2830 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9:30-10:30 | Maple | ||
| 10:30-11:00 | Coffee | ||
| 11:00-12:00 | Macaulay2 | ||
| 12:00-13:00 | Lunch | ||
| 13:00-14:00 | Jupyterlab | ||