The Free Mathematica ™

SAGE is a mathematical software package developed at the University of Washington. It's a free, open-source project intended to provide teachers, students, and the general public with all the features of advanced mathematics software like Mathematica™ -- without the cost.

You can learn more about SAGE at SAGE Math. I strongly recommend creating your very own SAGE notebook here. Even people who aren't total math nerds will find this software fun to play with!

How is Jeff involved?

I am an avid SAGE user. I find the software to be very useful and capable, and have used it to do my homework in many of my math classes.

However, I still recognize that SAGE has a long way to go to reach Mathematica's functionality. After trying to do Fourier wave analysis for an Honors Physics assignment, I quickly realized that SAGE wasn't up to the task of evaluating complex integrals. I should probably look into that as well -- I think SAGE uses Maxima as its integral evaluation backend.

I'm working on hacking SAGE as well. Currently, I'm developing an equation editor that makes SAGE more intuitive. You can check it out from my table of contents below. As expected, progress is rather slow. Hopefully time and motivation will appear concurrently sometime soon...