Ajit Kumar and Amri introduce participants to Sage Math on Day 1 of Sage Days 126.
The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai (IMSc) hosted Sage Days 126 between 31st August to 2nd September 2024. SageMath (Sage) is a free open-source software based in Python, which is a powerful tool for learning, teaching and research in various topics of basic and advanced maths. Sage Days is an event that travels around the world to bring together new and existing users with Sage contributors. Sage Days 126 started with an introduction to Sage and its use as a tool in education followed by its applications in specific fields of maths.
“Sage is a Computer Algebra System that has a lot of capability for teaching and has many pedagogical benefits,” says Ajit Kumar from the Institute for Chemical Technology, Mumbai. He teaches a popular NPTEL course on ‘Computational mathematics with SageMath’ for students and teachers. “Sage offers a nice progression from learning a programming language to performing advanced scientific computation,” he says. Students learn new concepts and the complex connections between them in the process of writing code, something that Ajit has extensively used in his teaching. “You could learn about mathematical structures in theory, but when you manipulate many examples using Sage, it leads to a better understanding,” says Amritanshu Prasad (Amri) from IMSc. “When you have to compute something it forces you to really think about what it is that you are computing and the parameters involved in its definition.”
For second year Bachelors students from the Central University of Tamil Nadu, Thiruvarur, Sage Days 126 is their first exposure to coding in mathematics. It is an introduction before they are taught Python and start using CoCalc (the online implementation of Sage) as a part of their course work. M Shriya, currently a Masters student at Kings College, London, was introduced to Sage when working on her thesis with Amri during her Masters from BITS Pilani. “I learnt what it takes to contribute to Sage during Days 114 in 2022. As a part of my thesis, I developed the vector partitions module in Sage-Combinat,” she says. “Sage helps you visualize maths concepts and is very good for people who are good at coding but cannot understand pure math,” she says. Shriya is currently developing new classes on Chow rings of Matroids in Sage as a Google Summer of Code project with Travis Scrimshaw from Hokkaido University.
“The first time I heard of Sage was from Amri,” says Viswanath Sankaran from IMSc. “He was an early adopter and he began telling everyone about it.” Amri himself started using Sage after hearing about it at a talk, and later invited Karl-Dieter Crisman from Gordon College to present lectures on Sage at IMSc. In the following years, the interest in Sage at IMSc gained momentum when Travis followed with another series of talks. This led to the organization of Sage Days 60, the first such event held at IMSc, which brought together many leading researchers and developers. “Around that time I ported a lot of my code into Sage. It has a lot of niche functionalities since it is developed by the community, for example, in combinatorics related to representation theory,” Viswanath says. “I use Sage all the time for my research, I would be crippled without it,” Amri says.
“It is not much appreciated that mathematics has an experimental side to it,” Amri says. At the end of the day we have to write a proof, but to discover results we do experiments to guess at formulae and relationships. Sage has a lot of power to run these experiments,” he adds. “More and more people are realizing that this is very helpful.”
