Sage: Open Source Mathematics Software

Recently, I spent some time to search for free, open-source alternatives for commercial mathematics programs such as Matlab and Mathcad.

By far the most promising software I have found was Sage. Sage combines the power of many (currently 71) existing open-source packages into a common Python-based interface. It can be used to explore mathematical constructions in algebra, geometry, number theory, calculus, numerical computation, etc.

The combination of proven open-source packages (including excellent Python packages such as Numpy, Matlibplot, Scipy and Sympy) and an excellent web browser based entry of formulas and plots in worksheets called notebooks. The usage of Python as the glue that holds all packages together provides several advantages. First you have the full power of python available in Sage. Second, you don't need to learn another specialized script language that you would otherwise not need.

Excellent screencasts together with good tutorials and documentation pages provide an easy introduction for beginners.

The main problem that I can see so far is that - probably because of the many different packages combined in Sage - providing Sage support for different platforms is not simple. Currently only no distribution-specific Linux (...tar.gz-files) and Mac OS X binaries are available. Windows users can only use a VMWare Image of Sage. But a native Windows port is in the works as well as distribution specific Linux binaries for Debian and Fedora.

More details about the Sage project page can be found at http://www.sagemath.org.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Automatically mount a ntfs hard disk at login in Ubuntu 8.04

Ubuntu 8.04 automatically detects connected hard drives (such as a second drive with an NTFS partition). NTFS hard drives are not mounted automatically by default in Ubuntu 8.04. Instead they need to be mounted manually e.g. via clicking onto them in Nautilus. Sometimes it is desirable that such a NTFS drive will be automatically mounted at login (e.g. when you want to run a script that uses these drives at startup). This can be done via: 1) Make a mounting point for that drive sudo mkdir /media/Backup_HD Note: Replace "Backup_HD" with whatever name you like. 2) Edit /etc/fstab: sudo gedit /etc/fstab 3) Add the following text in fstab: /dev/sdb1 /media/Backup_HD ntfs defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 1 Note: Replace "/media/Backup_HD" with the name you choose in the 1st step. Furthermore, replace "/dev/sdb1" with the actual value for the hard disk you want to mount automatically. Note: If you don't know what value you should use instead of "/dev/sdb1&
Read more

How to make screenshots and screencasts easily in Mac OS X?

In Mac OS X you can take a screenshot of the complete screen by pressing Command-Shift-3 and a selection of the screen by pressing Command-Shift-4. This is usually sufficient enough, but if you try to use this key combination to capture a screenshot of a movie running in the Mac OS X DVD Player you will be surprised to find out that this doesn't work. The same is true for the built in Grab Application. If you still want to do capture a picture from a DVD you could use the screen-capture shell utility in the Terminal application - as described in several webpages. But if you would like something more convenient you could use an application such as Jing ( http://www.techsmith.com/jing/ ). It allows you not only to take a picture even from a movie running in the DVD Player but also to make a short videos of the your screen and provides several options to edit, save and share this pictures and videos afterwards. There is a Free version available as well as a Pro version with more f
Read more

Use Canon CanScan LiDE 60 under Ubuntu 8.04

Yesterday, I needed my scanner the first time after installing Ubuntu 8.04. In Ubuntu 7.10 I could use the scanner as normal user with xsane. Now running xsane let to the following error message: Segmentation fault whereas running xsane as root with sudo xsane works. The following shows the current status of my investigation. sane-find-scanner let to the following output: # sane-find-scanner will now attempt to detect your scanner. If the # result is different from what you expected, first make sure your # scanner is powered up and properly connected to your computer. # No SCSI scanners found. If you expected something different, make sure that # you have loaded a kernel SCSI driver for your SCSI adapter. found USB scanner (vendor=0x04a9 [Canon], product=0x221c [CanoScan], chip=GL842) at libusb:006:008 # Your USB scanner was (probably) detected. It may or may not be supported by # SANE. Try scanimage -L and read the backend's manpage. # Not checking for parallel port scanners. #
Read more