Sage is comprehensive unified open source software for mathematical and scientific computing that builds on high-quality mainstream methodologies and tools. This proposal would further the development of Sage by funding a series of three Sage Days workshops per year. The primary thrust of these workshops would be to improve the usability and value of Sage for scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, and especially as a tool to support research and education by undergraduate and graduate students. Morever, many graduate students would receive funding via their involvement in the workshops.
Sage has the potential to have a transformative impact on the computational sciences, by helping to set a high standard for reproducible computational research and peer reviewed publication of code. Sage excels at supporting cutting edge research in a broad range of areas of computational mathematics, ranging from applied numerical computation to the most abstract realms of number theory. All data and software that comes out of this project will be made freely available over the Internet. This will result in tools that may transform how researchers in mathematics share and manipulate their data and collaborate.
This grant funded 17 week-long workshops over 3 years, with about 20 participants each. The goal of the grant was to expand the scope of Sage to cover a wider range of functionality, esepcially numerical computation. We found that such functionality was already being rapidly developed by the numerical Python community better than we could do it, and much of their work gets immediately incorporated into Sage. So instead we attacked the goal of the grant proposal more indirectly by supporting Cython, which is a critical tools during the last few years for developing numerical software, and by widening the scope of Sage and who contributes to Sage development by funding several Sage Days workshops for women and workshops that involve making Sage available online (often attended by numerical Python people). We successfully greatly extended the availability of Sage to the web, through four workshops, which produced the SageMathCloud and the Sage Cell Server. Finally, we sponsored a workshop on arithmetic dynamics using Sage, two on p-adic methods in number theory, and a workshop that was critical in transitioning Sage to git and a modern development process. We also ran several workshops on systematically fixing bugs in Sage, so that Sage is a more usable high quality platform. Though numerically the total number of users of Sage has hovered at about 50,000 since 2011, Sage development activity and use in research mathematics has thrived during the period of this grant. For example, there were 17 (!) workshops just during 2013 that were either official Sage Days workshops or involved extensive Sage development activities (see http://wiki.sagemath.org/Workshops). There are now over 400 publications listed at http://sagemath.org/library-publications.html that used Sage. Over this period of the grant, we regularly had well over 100 distinct contributors to each Sage release. Finally, the Sage project was recognized in 2013 with the Richard Dimick Jenks Memorial Prize for Excellence in Software Engineering applied to Computer Algebra.
