Monday, May 9, 2016

Getting Started

I first heard about Google Summer of Code a little over a year ago. It was something that I wanted to do for several reasons. I only had a chance to take a couple of programing classes in undergrad. (I didn't realized that I liked it till part way through my Junior year.) Since then, I've wanted to grow the length and complexity of projects that I was capable of successfully working on. Secondly, I like the idea of open source resources, because its free, and that lets poor college students use cool resources.

My project is building and expanding tools in Sage to be used by people studying matroid theory. A matroid is a notion of independence that generalizes the independence structure that is found in vector spaces and that comes from looking at cycleless subgraphs of graphs. Sage already has a lot of tools that let people work with matroids, mostly created by Stefan van Zwam and Rudi Pendavingh. My project focuses on a small collection of new tools.

I'll be working with Stefan and Michael on this project.