A Sage/SciPy Developer Workshop: Special Functions and Computational Number Theory Meet Scientific Computing; Austin, TX

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

This workshop is an instance of SAGE Days (number 11 to be precise), a periodic gathering where developers of the software package SAGE, a free and open software that supports research and teaching in algebra, geometry, number theory, cryptography, and related areas, address current issues of the software, program for very long hours, either improving existing code or adding new code, and plan the next steps to be taken. For example, this workshop includes working on adding to SAGE the capability to work with modular forms over function fields. In addition to the above standard features of such a meeting, this particular workshop includes a strong emphasis in the interaction betwen algebra and number theory (the area of the bulk of the SAGE developers and researchers in attendance) and computer science, supercomputing (from TACC, the Texas supercomputing center) and applied Mathematics (from ICES, the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences) at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as researchers working outside academia (from Entought, an Austin based company). The main goals of this workshop are: (i) to support the development of the free and open source software SAGE by gathering some of its developers as well as researchers that use it in their own research; (ii) to bring together the SAGE commnunity and various research groups at the host location, the University of Texas at Austin, that while might have very different research focus share many common computational problems and needs. To give just one example, being able to solve large linear algebra problems accurately and fast is a fundamental problem that underlies essentially any type of scientific computation imaginable. The availability of high level software is nowadays of crucial and increasing importance for research in Mathematics, both in applied and pure Mathematics. SAGE is an example of a be very powerful computer package that is at the cutting edge (in terms of the sophistication of its capabilities as well as its speed) of existing tools for research in Mathematics and its applications; particularly, in those areas related to algebra, number theory, geometry and cryptography. The workshop is planned with the SAGE development model in mind, distinguished by an emphasis on openness, community, cooperation, and collaboration.