Computational Algebra Seminar: Monagan -- Efficiency Problems in the History of Maple

Title:  Efficiency Problems in the History of Maple
Speaker: Michael Monagan, Department of Mathematics, Simon Fraser University
Time & Place: 15.00-16.00, Thursday 5 March, SMRI Seminar Rm
Abstract:
The first paper on Maple was published and presented in 1983. The paper
was entitled "The Design of Maple: a compact, portable and powerful
Computer Algebra System".  Powerful meant that Maple could solve a wide
range of problems in a reasonable time.  However, the early versions
of Maple were not efficient.  One reason for this was that the main
competition, Reduce and Macsyma, were also not very efficient.  I will
present six efficiency problems that were identified, how they were fixed,
and some lessons I learned about designing and implementing a Computer
Algebra System.  I'll also compare Maple with Magma and show that Magma is
very slow on some problems.  I'll end with a status update on polynomial
factorization implementations and show some timing benchmarks comparing
Maple, Magma, Singular and Maxima.