Getting started with Sage
Sage (http://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 (http://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. On Ubuntu, you can use the system's package manager (see http://www.sagemath.org/download-linux.html). Binaries exist for most systems except Windows, where you generally have to use VirtualBox (a virtualization solution...