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 Summer of Code: Axiom Projects Information on Google's Summer of Code project is available here I. DOCUMENTATION Axiom is documented with 4 books which are under development, a tutorial, a programmer's guide, a reference volume, and a developer's guide. work on the reference volume of the book The reference volume is intended to provide complete lookup coverage of the Axiom system. There are over 11,000 functions within Axiom which require standardized documentation. This project would involve visiting each algebra file (approx 300 files) to make a complete listing of all of the function signatures and their type information. Ideally this should be automated as the information is available. The output should be a set of Latex files which will contain boiler-plate documentation. The Latex output should be able to produce an index for the reference volume. literate documentation Axiom consists of literate programs. Each lisp, C, Makefile, etc is written by combining Latex and source code into a Latex document. At build time the source code and technical paper are extracted from these documents automatically. There are several thousand files in Axiom each of which needs to be understood and properly documented. Choose an algorithm (such as the greatest common divisor) or an area (such as p-adic numbers) and provide the required documentation for the algorithms. language translation Axiom is a worldwide project. It is used in multiple countries and runs on platforms like Red Flag Linux (Chinese). We have some introductory documentation in French but we need people who can translate the book into any non-english language. This requires that you be fluent in both languages. The result should be a set of latex documents that are a complete translation of the original material Television/DVD presentation We need to design and script an effective introduction to Axiom for new users. The most effective way to do this (at least from the new user's point of view) would be a DVD/TV kind of presentation. Rather than just a dry presentation of fact we would need to script a light, fast-moving presentation similar to the courses by Cerebellum on General Chemistry. This would require background in areas like video editing, script writing, production, direction, etc. and would be ideal for a liberal arts person who wanted to explore educational activities. For an online example view go-opensource. If done carefully it could be coordinated with MIT. MIT's Open Courseware Site has their Mathematics online and some courses, notably Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra (18.06) has a complete video lecture online. II. USER INTERFACE [AxiomTK]? work on the windows version of the browser and graphics Axiom can output its equations in many formats such as FORTRAN or TeX. We need to develop a jsMath output format for browsers. (see http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/examples/Henrici.html) We need to develop a MathML output format for browsers. Axiom has a browser and a graphics component. Both of these user interface components are written in C using X11 and are hard to port to Windows. We're experimenting with methods of creating a platform independent method of implementing these components. Common Lisps can communicate with TK which provides a platform independent way of displaying graphics. We need to work out the lisp code necessary to read browser pages and render them as TK pages Mathematica has a free reader program which is designed to show their notebooks. The format for the reader is standard ascii. We could develop an Axiom output format that would allow us to create notebooks from Axiom taking advantage of the features of the Mathematics notebook. work on the wiki version of the browser and graphics An alternative project is to use a browser as the standard front end to both the Axiom browser and the graphics. We need to work out the wiki code to use the browser pages directly in the wiki. The task is to figure out how to get the wiki to accept the browser page syntax and how to inline graphics in wiki pages. III. SYSTEM BUILDING and TESTING develop regression testing Axiom has several hundred test cases that are run during the build of the system. Each of these test cases generate output. Create a systematic way of using this test suite for systematic regression testing and implement it. The result should be integrated into the Axiom Makefile machinery. develop test cases Axiom has about 1100 "domains" which include about 11,000 functions. We need to systematically create and organize a domain-by-domain set of reference test cases with explanations, boundary cases, etc. Develop an automated generate-and-test program. Axiom allows you to select domains and use these to build up types. A systematic way of constructing types and elements of the types is needed. Input could be from the databases which contain signature information for all types and functions. Additionally it would be useful if the test program parsed the expressions and kept all of the generated tests in a tree so we could decide issues like coverage. The tree should be searchable for both function and domain information. There is already software that is very close: AldorUnit?. As an example, it is used for testing with ALLPROSE. test graphics code The Graphics component on Axiom has not been systematically tested. Use the handbook of curves and surfaces to comprehensively test the graphics routines. The result should be a set of input files which recreate all of the graphics in the CRC handbook and a set of bug reports that document failure cases. An alternative result is to modify the graphics code to handle the failure cases. This would require learning the details of C, X11, and the graphics code. IV. NEW FEATURES drag-and-drop Axiom uses Knuth's idea of literate programs as the basic file format for all of its code. There is a project called Doyen which needs to be able to drag-and-drop a literate program onto a running Axiom system and have that code and documentation automatically added to the system. Given a literate program that includes axiom algebra code and some text figure out how to "drag and drop" the paper onto axiom. that is, figure out how to get the code in the right place, the makefile to accept the code, the paper in the right place and integrated into the documentation The result should be a working demonstration. dvi organization As part of the build process Axiom generates hundreds of dvi files (output from Latex) that represent the documentation associated with every source file. Currently these are minimally organized by directory. The task is to work out an automated way of organizing these files. One possibility is to organize the algebra file documentation according to the algebra lattice. The output should be a program that can be run to create the proper organization, likely as a Latex file. booklet mechanism Pamphlets use random names in code chunks. Develop a full URL syntax and create a booklet mechanism. That is, one should be able to define a chunk as:  <> and have something inserted inline or :: <> and have something inserted inline.  The result should be a rewrite of the booklet command. semantic markups In the future Axiom is intended to allow searches of the computational literates (such as math papers) based on concepts. In order to do this we need to develop latex macros for marking "concepts" in latex files. This will allow the author to mark up literate programs and math papers and create a concept index, similar to the word index mechanism latex now uses. The result should be a latex.sty style file. flash integration Axiom does not know how to dynamically create flash files. The flash file format is open source. The task is to develop an interface that will allow algebra programs to generate flash animation output. An example is to compute and animate the surface wave of water struck by a round pebble dropped from a given height. V. MATHEMATICAL WORK Field Theory Module (a la FeynCalc) Literate Program to implement "Primes is in P" algorithm Axiom has permission to use the paper "Primes is in P" as example documentation. This paper is widely known. It has the theory, a proof of the theory, an algorithm and a proof of the algorithm. However it lacks an implementation in Axiom. Implement the algorithm as a literate program (we already have the paper as a pamphlet file) and integrate it into both the Axiom documentation and the Axiom sources. Symbolic Summation algorithm There is an algorithm for computing Symbolic Sums but it is not currently implemented in Axiom. Study this algorithm and implement it. The result should be a literate program that can do symbolic summation in Axiom complete with a test suite. CATS, a Computer Algebra Test Suite There are many different computer algebra systems and they all develop their own ad-hoc test suites. These suites have no organizational structure nor any verified results. The National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) has a categorization of numerical mathematical algorithms. A similar categorization does not exist for symbolic math. The task would involve creating a taxonomy of symbolic math that provides reference problems with verified results as well as an implementation for these cases using Axiom. Note that the taxonomy should not be Axiom specific. The result would be a taxonomy, the reference cases, the Axiom cases, and the Makefile machinery to automate testing. There should also be bug reports filed for failure cases. Magnus integration Magnus is an open source implementation of infinite group theory algorithms. These need to be extracted, documented, and implemented in Axiom The first result would be the category/domain hierarchy to support infinite group theory. The second and continuing result would be the implementation of the algorithms as literate programs. Expand Axiom's set of linear algebra algorithm's to include symbolic LU decomposition and other missing common operations. Extend the functionality of Axiom's non-commutative polynomial domains (XPOLY) to permit substitions and rule-based pattern matching. Implement a new Axiom mathematical category of directed graphs to serve as the foundation for several other projects ranging from the domain of categories (in the sense of category theory) to more pedesteran concerns such as data structures operations on graphs (based on graph theory) and integration of tools for the efficient display of large graphs (of particular interest to future maintenance and development of complex dependency structure of the Axiom library itself). Graph the algebra lattice Axiom has a large type lattice that needs to be documented. One of the key tools for understanding the dependent relations would be a graph of the lattice. The current graph would include about 1100 nodes and, so far, has resisted efforts to construct a graph. The result would be a graph, likely using a dynamic visualization tool since printing it would not be useful. Simulation integration There is a bridge simulation game called Pontefex (now called Bridge Builder, I believe) by ChronicLogic?. Bridges are constructed from beams. Beams can be modeled by two matrices, one at each end. Forces can be vectors and can be applied and resolved into forces of compression or tension, twisting or bending. All of these can be written using Axiom. So the idea is to combine the Bridge Builder program with Axiom in order to be able to model the forces on a bridge and try to accurately predict where the bridge will fail prior to running the simulation. This would combine Axiom with a commercial product to better illustrate the power available. It would require contacting the company, negotiating the deal, and leading a project to integrate the two pieces of software in effective ways. Overall, a very big, long term project. V. RESEARCH PROBLEMS Reading Soiffer's PhD? thesis (The Design of a User Interface for Computer Algebra Systems) raises an interesting research question. Assume you're given a standard page size (8 1/2 x 11, A4, display size) and you have an equation to format in some understandable way how can you format the equation to fit on one page. The underlying "assumption" is that equations longer than one page are unreadable and useless. There are a variety of techniques: line breaks when the equation hits the edge common subexpression elimination when it can occur  R = (x+y) (z+(xy)) ==> let M = (x+y) R = M * (z+M) so that you can "name" common subexpressions and lift them  function reification  "name" a subexpression that requires a parameter, lift it out, and substitute a parameterized term. in a tree or DAG representation this is node-naming  term reification  "name" a term, lift it out, and substitute in a tree or DAG representation this is node-naming  term summarization  replacing a (reordered) subset of the terms by a summation  eliding leading, trailing, or middle terms  term + term + ... + term  linearizing terms  terms, such as fractions, can be rewritten in linear form to save lines  constant naming  long constants replaced by short names: R = 3.77612876767 * foo ==> let M = 3.77612876767 R = M * foo  pattern naming  turn 2D template structures (powers/ratios/matricies/polys) into "named" template structures and substitute +- -+ +- -+ | 1 2 | | 5 6 | | | * | | | 3 4 | | 7 8 | +- -+ +- -+ turns into A = Matrix((1 2) (3 4)) B = Matrix((5 6) (7 8)) MatrixProduct(A,B)  operator names for all template structures and linear versions "outer structure" recognition  is it fundamentally a matrix? a polynomial? an integral? the layout techniques could differ based on the outer structure  "inner structure" eliding  clip out "heavy" element in a matrix so it does not cause wide columns  depth, width, height maximums as parameters Ultimately it seems this boils down to a question of embedding a tree or a DAG into a planar graph. or perhaps this is an extension of the TeX layout algorithm with each weights assigned to the boxes? compute the weight (area?) of a node in the tree or DAG and do some sort of weight-reduction? Summer of Code: Axiom Mentors The following are possible mentors for some of the above projects. Interested students should contact Tim Daly and identify the project you want to work on. Potential mentors please insert your info in alphabetical order (by last name). Tim Daly, lead Axiom developer, Carnegie Mellon University Bill Page, Axiom developer, Kingston, Ontario, Canada William Sit, Professor of Mathematics, City College of New York Axiom Foundation --Bill Page, Wed, 01 Jun 2005 13:47:08 -0500 replyGoogle's Summer of Code requires a Mentoring Organization I think the [Axiom Foundation]? would be ideal for this purpose. Let's try to get the [Axiom Foundation]? added to the list at http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html OldWishList --Bill Page, Thu, 02 Jun 2005 10:25:14 -0500 replySome additional possible projects and some additional information about the above projects is available on the Axiom OldWishList page. Other Axiom-related projects --Bill Page, Thu, 02 Jun 2005 10:58:31 -0500 replyAlthough I am sure that we have enough projects listed above to keep an army of students busy for several years, I think creating this list is a very useful exercise in and of itself. Maybe another category would be a good idea. Something like: VI. AXIOM-RELATED PROJECTS Complete the (re-)integration of the Aldor compiler into the open source version of Axiom. Aldor (previously known as the AXIOMXL library compiler) is a stand alone compiler that is compatible with the AXIOM SPAD programming language. Aldor can be used to write new algorthms and more efficient versions of existing library code. Extensions to MathAction - the Axiom Wiki Extend the interface to Axiom to permit display of Axiom graphics on MathAction Axiom graphics requires the X-windows environment. This can be done on the server using the virtual framebuffer driver Xfbdev and the xvfb-run script. See: To process graphic commands from a wiki page Axiom must be started with xvfb-run with graphics enabled:  xvfb-run axiom -gr -noht -noclef  the Axiom command, e.g.:  viewport1 := draw(sin x, x=-%pi..%pi)  needs to be able to communicate with the graphics processor in the X-windows environment to create the graphic image. Additional Axiom commands can write this to a postscript file and display in on the web page. E.g.:  write(viewport1, "graphic1", "postscript") \begin{latex} \psfig {graphic1.VIEW/axiom2D.ps} \end{latex}  Add web interfaces to other open source mathematical In addition to Axiom, MathAction already has interfaces to several other packages including Reduce and GraphViz. Interfaces to other open source mathematical packages such as listed on the RosettaStone page could help to build a stronger community among mathematical software developers. This in turn would lead to improvements in Axiom and all related packages. ... --Bob McElrath?, Fri, 03 Jun 2005 15:30:23 -0500 replyLinux Fund may be another source of funds for work on axiom.

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