Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Google Funds Sage!!

Today Chris DiBona (open source programs manager at Google) fully funded a proposal [pdf] that some students and I put together to carry out four critically important Sage development projects this summer (2008):

  • Mike Hansen (UCSD): Implement combinatorial species in Sage. This will provide a backend to handle a wide range of new combinatorial objects with minimal effort.
  • Gary Furnish (Utah): Implement new optimized symbolic manipulation code in Cython. This will greatly speed up symbolic computation in Sage, and reduce Sage's dependence on Maxima.
  • Robert Miller (UW): Implement fast code for permutation groups and backtracking algorithms. This is needed for general applications to graph and code automorphism groups computations, and can be used to exhaustively generate isomorphism class representatives of a wide class of mathematical objects.
  • Yi Qiang (UW): Further document, improve the usability of, and provide numerous real world examples of distributed computing with Sage. This will greatly help in applications of Sage to research that involve parallel computation.


This funding is not part of the Google Summer of Code (the projects above do not fit with any of the mentoring organizations), but is instead I hope part of more longterm support by Google for the Sage project and open source mathematical software that provides people with a free alternative to Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, and Magma.