Ideas for Software to Integrate with Sage

This is a list of programs and packages for mathematics that might possibly be included with or at least have an interface with Sage someday.

• Sums of Squares via Macaulay2. This is related to http://www.cds.caltech.edu/sostools/

• http://www-sop.inria.fr/galaad/software/synaps/ -- It's a GPL'd C++ library for doing numerical and algebraic stuff together and seems mature. It requires FORTRAN and is very hard to build. I skimmed some source code and it seemed relatively readable at first glance, and maybe there is something useful in there. It's focused on numerical over algebraic.

• http://www.yacas.org/ -- YACAS is an easy to use, general purpose Computer Algebra System. It uses its own programming language (a sort of Lisp dialect) designed for symbolic as well as arbitrary-precision numerical computations (it can be linked to GMP library). YACAS comes with extensive documentation (320+ pages) covering the scripting language, the functionality that is already implemented in the system, and the algorithms used.

• Bergman (non-commutative Groebner bases).

• kseg (dynamic Euclidean geometry, a la Geometer's Sketchpad; relevant for educational users). (This is GPLV2+)

• scmutils, an MIT-Scheme package for symbolic manipulation, mostly with differential geometry. Created for the SICM: Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics course

• blad: BLAD is an acronym standing for Bibliothèques Lilloises d'Algèbre Différentielle. BLAD is actually sort of a standalone C analogue of the MAPLE diffalg package. BLAD is LGPL.

Software that is free and tries to do what Sage does

• http://www.mathemagix.org/mmxweb/web/welcome.en.html -- Their overall goal is very similar to Sage's. However, they make different design choices than we have with Sage in almost every way:

  • They build everything around texmacs, which is a "beautiful" yet aggravating program.

  • They use C++ *very* very heavily.
  • They write their own new custom interpreter language for mathematics (though they describe it as general purpose, and strongly emphasize it shouldn't be for just math).