Just saw the GSOC announcement - awesome stuff! My name is Andrew Silver, I'm an undergraduate mathematics major at the University of Florida (Gainseville, FL). I currently do numerical/statistical work in computer vision: I'm comfortable in C++, familiar with Java, HTML5, Javascript, and recently Sage/Python.
This semester I was lucky enough to get into a graduate course in Computational Topology (Topological Data Analysis), and I'm hooked. Why Sage? I compiled Sage as soon as my prof gave us a long hw assignment that involved computing homology of a torus, klein bottle, and the Real Projective Plane... ..based on triangulations that had 27x18 boundary matrices we had to get in smith form... (I actually found a bug in matrices mod 2 that I have a ticket open for, just got to write up some doctests and it should be fixed). I used Sage instead of Matlab because I couldn't figure out how to get Matlab to save the u,v matrices - open source is the way to go. What do I want to do? I'd love to work on implementing knots/links as per ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/15v7lXZR1U4H2pT21d2fyPduYGb74JAFjkXJ6CWYmYfw/pub#h.6l9ekqoc9br7 ), writing classes, functions, invariants, etc. A potential caveat is how much we want to "reinvent the wheel" because there are already existing implementations in other packages for some of these things. If there isn't enough work there, I'd also be interested in integrating Stanford's computational topology tools into Sage (http://comptop.stanford.edu/programs/) for persistent homology calculations. Dr. Carlsson (Stanford) gave a talk at UF this week and told me that the tools are still under development, so it would probably be a matter of getting permission if the community wants to go this route. Or we could start from scratch. I'm thinking Persistence Diagrams, Barcodes, witness complexes, etc. Other math exposure: Linear Algebra Introductory Probability Calc I - III Discrete Mathematics Why do I want to do this? If I don't contribute to Sage, I'd be implementing algorithms for my research anyway. Might as well share them with other people! github that I contribute to when I have time: https://github.com. You can reach me by email at [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-gsoc" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-gsoc. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
