Getting started with Sage

Sage (www.sagemath.org) is a standalone mathematics software based on Python. It is an open source alternative to commercial products such as Mathematica, Maple, or MATLAB. Sage provides a unified interface to many open source mathematical libraries. These libraries include SciPy, SymPy, NetworkX, and other Python scientific packages, but also non-Python libraries such as ATLAS, BLAS, GSL, LAPACK, Singular, and many others.

In this recipe, we will give a brief introduction to Sage.

Getting ready

You can either:

• Install Sage on your local computer (www.sagemath.org/doc/installation/)
• Create Sage notebooks remotely in the cloud (https://cloud.sagemath.com/)

Being based on so many libraries, Sage is heavy and hard to compile from source. Binaries exist for most systems except Windows, where you generally have to use VirtualBox (a virtualization solution: www.virtualbox.org).

Alternatively, you can use Sage in a browser with an IPython notebook running on the cloud.

Note that...