Sage Days 99: SageMath and Macaulay2 - An Open Source Initiative

General Information

Sage Days 99: SageMath and Macaulay2 - An Open Source Initiative will be a five-day workshop bringing together developers from the Macaulay2 and Sage communities to discuss, design, and implement new algorithms and computational tools that will be of use to scientists and industry professionals. All software developed during the workshop will be made freely available as part of the open-source mathematics software systems Macaulay2 and Sage. Themes of the workshop include algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, representation theory, combinatorics, and optimization. The workshop will include talks on target features and the logistics of Macaulay2 and Sage development, as well as working groups on a variety of participant-driven themes.

When and where?

July 22-26, 2019, at the IMA, University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis, MN, USA.

Tentative list of Coding Projects (Group Leader)

Further development of plane partition class (Jessica Striker)

Plane partitions have many intriguing combinatorial properties and symmetries, including connections to current research. At SageDays 78, a class for plane partitions in a box was implemented. At this workshop, I would like to add important functionality to this class, including generation of plane partitions summing to n (rather than in a bounding box), symmetry classes, random generation, and maps to fundamental domains. We could also consider coding a connection to Macaulay2, as plane partitions are in bijection with monomial ideals of three variables.

A new version of the D-modules package (Laura Matusevich)

Description: The M2 D-modules package was coded by Anton Leykin and Harrison Tsai almost 20 years ago; the current version 1.4 is about 8 years old. The goal of this project is to give the D-modules package some TLC. No specific expertise in D-modules is required: I will bring you up to speed on the basic theory, and go through the algorithms that form the core of the package. The main objective is to optimize the main functions and make them more user friendly.

Geometry of matroids (Jacob Matherne)

The goal of this coding project is to implement several combinatorial and geometric objects recently arising in matroid theory. Two places to start are Kazhdan-Lusztig (KL) polynomials and Chow rings of matroids. KL polynomials were defined via a recursive algorithm by Elias, Proudfoot, and Wakefield in 2014. These polynomials carry both combinatorial and algebro-geometric information about the matroid but their recursive implementation is prohibitively slow for larger rank matroids. By now there are explicit formulas for KL polynomials of several classes of matroids---one goal of this coding project will be to implement code which uses these quicker formulas when they exist.

The Chow ring of a matroid was the object of recent intense study by Adiprasito, Huh, and Katz---these rings, for representable matroids, are the cohomology rings of a certain variety associated to the corresponding hyperplane arrangement. Chow rings of matroids admit a variety of maps to Chow rings of related matroids (mirroring maps that exist between cohomology rings in algebraic topology). Another goal of this coding project is to implement these rings (and related ones) and the system of maps between them. If time permits, we will implement more from the theory of posets, hyperplane arrangements, and matroids.

Groebner bases for FI-modules (Steven Sam)

The application of FI-modules to examples in topology, commutative algebra, combinatorics, etc. has seen an explosion of activity in the last several years. Here FI is the category of finite sets and bijective functions and an FI-module is a functor to the category of vector spaces. The idea is strongly connected to the representation theory of symmetric groups and stability phenomena that occur in examples. Explicit computation with FI-modules can be done via a theory of Gr\"obner bases for categories which is developed in work of Sam-Snowden. However, no computer implementation exists for doing this, so the goal of this project is to provide one.

Maps between toric varieties or between simplicity complexes (Greg Smith)

• Option 1) Add new functionality to the NormalToricVarieties package related to toric maps. This likely involves adding a new Type called “ToricMaps”, creating basic constructors (such as the canonical map associated to a blowup) and tests (such as isProper). More ambiguously, it would also create the induced maps on toric divisors, coherent sheafs, and intersection rings. One might even hope to compute higher direct images is some cases (although this would likely require new algorithms). This option only makes sense if there are enough participants with a sufficiently strong background in toric geometry. I already have some code to get things started.

  Option 2) Add new functionality to the SimplicialComplexes package related to simplicial maps. Again, this likely involves adding a new Type, creating basic constructors, and appropriate Boolean-valued methods. Creating the induced maps on Chain Complexes would be a key application—one would like to have all of the elementary operations from algebraic topology. One would also like to add a database of “classic” examples. I believe that some first steps in this direction were taken at the 2017 Macaulay2 workshop in Berkeley, but the changes haven’t yet been incorporated into the distributed version. This project has the advantage having much smaller prerequisites.

More projects to be posted. Please feel free to add your own interests or email Gregg (musiker at math dot umn dot edu) or Christine (cberkesc at math dot umn dot edu) with them if you do not have direct wiki editing access.