On 12/1/06, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Thu, 30 Nov 2006 19:16:39 -0800, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Below is a message from a student who I met, who had tried to use SAGE > > but a) found the dependence on knowledge of rings to be awkward > > I think currently SAGE is not aimed at people who haven't had > a course in abstract algebra.
This is definitely the case. While one does not need to understand all the ins and outs of ring theory in order to make a matrix in SAGE, you at least have to understand the connection between rings and matrices. This is going to be, at the very least, intimidating to people who have never heard of a ring. And if they have to mess with algebraic structures at all, they may consider it an annoying and unnecessary waste of time. Various people have done a lot of > work for SAGE that is aimed at such people, but frankly I do > not have a good strategy to make SAGE accessible > to people who know about groups, rings, fields, etc. I'm interested in starting some brainstorming about ways to make SAGE very > accessible to people who don't know about those algebraic structures. Yes, let's come up with such a strategy. I do think we need a unified plan. If not, we run the risk of having a bunch of different implementations of software aimed at such people, each having low interoperability both amongst themselves and with the other areas of SAGE. Ideas? For starters, perhaps David Kaplan could suggest a couple > of specific sample problems that he would like to use SAGE to solve, > and we could think about how: > > (1) they could be done, but require unreasonable knowledge of algebra > (2) they can't be easily done right now, but could be if we put > some additional code in SAGE. > SAGE includes Maxima, and Maxima is extremely capable at Calculus related > computations -- so one question is how to make such capabilities > available from SAGE without the user having to know anything about maxima > (or even what maxima is). So far SAGE is terrible at this, compared to > how good it could be. Looking at the actual problems that people might want to do is a good way to get started. But again, I'd caution against taking too much of an ad-hoc approach. I think that calculus is a great place to start. First of all, we do have Maxima. Also, having an easy-to-use calculus package that displays its output prettily is a must for any self-respecting CAS. With jsMath and Maxima, we have a real potential to blow away the competition here. And finally, calculus is kind of a lowest common denominator among people who are using a CAS. It's probably the first thing that any non-mathematician would try... first impressions are important. Re. brainstorming, I'd like to do this. Maybe after the meeting today, or sometime on Monday? I know things are busy getting 1.5 ready for release, so maybe we should wait until after that gets out the door. > b) didn't get much info out of the documentation. > > He's very excited about open source software, especially for > > mathematics, and seems to be interested in working on documentation. > > One thing he explicitly expressed interest in was helping make a short > > tutorial for getting started with SAGE. David J., you're working on > > such a thing, aren't you? > > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > > Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:06:28 -0800 (PST) > > From: David Kaplan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Subject: Sage > > > > This is my email. I am interested in helping the Sage Project in any way > > possible. I was thinking documentation. > > Dave K. > > Im working on Mandriva Linux, btw, but I can test on the standardized > > cygwin binary too. > -- Bobby Moretti [EMAIL PROTECTED] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
