I agree somewhat with others here that you might want to make this a little more 'technical'. I would start with your sentence "Sage itself is..." - describe what it is first, then some of its capabilities and technical advantages. As far as open-source and free, I think the best thing is to highlight the concrete advantages this brings: easy collaboration with anyone in the world, possibilities for education and the developing world, verifying correctness of implementations, and the ease of becoming a developer (or to put it another way, the ease of getting your own code in).
Your more personal background and reasons for starting it could either go later in the abstract, or you could just put them in the talk itself. Cheers, Marshall On Apr 30, 12:57 am, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm giving a plenary talk at ISSAC in Linz, Austria this summer. I'm supposed > to write a 2-page "abstract/paper" for the proceedings. I just wrote > something: > > http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/was/tmp/abstract.pdf > > I've been advised by some people on this list to focus on algorithms in Sage > and purely technical things, but I've totally ignored that advice and instead > written something very social in which I as honestly as possible lay out > exactly > why Sage exists and try to describe somewhat just what Sage is. > > I have to submit this in a couple days, but comments are welcome. > > -- William > > -- > William Stein > Associate Professor of Mathematics > University of Washingtonhttp://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
