SageMath - Open source is ready to compete in the classroom

What do you do when you are a high caliber mathematician or scientist and you want share your algorithms and code? This sounds like a job for github, but the problem is often this work is done on proprietary platforms such as Magma, Matlab, Mathematica or others.

Not only can you not share your licenses for say, Matlab, but there are often proprietary separate libraries and tools for specialized work. These are expensive products. One example from my distant past was using the Wavelet toolbox on Matlab. Matlab is 2,000 euros and the wavelet library is another 1,000 euros! So to share my code, you must have both licenses for yourself. This is a problem.

Well, if you're William Stein you take this problem and turn it into an opportunity to build an open source competitor to Matlab and related platforms. This episode is all about SageMath, an open source, feature rich option for scientists and mathematicians built by over 500 contributors and consisting of over 500k lines of Python and Cython code.

Links from the show:


Video by William telling the story of SageMath.