Update from JMM2014: WeBWork, LaTeX, and Sage Cells

I was in Baltimore for a couple of days last week and concentrated on talks related to open source texts and software.   I spoke in one of the sessions on open source texts, outlining this project.

There were three main things I added to my "to do" list based on the talks I attended.

1. Start developing problem sets for WeBWork.   To that end, I've arranged for out WeBWork server at UMass Lowell to updated, and once that's done I hope to get started on developing problems.
2. Start the process of converting our book to LaTeX.   One of the talks, by David Farmer, convinced me that getting our "source content" into a mainstream  format is the way to go.
3. Embedded Sage Cells seem to be a good to introduce the use of Sage in mathematics.  I hope to gradually add content in that form to our web page.  I did a short test page showing how to create graphs at http://faculty.uml.edu/klevasseur/ads2/sage_cell/sage_cell_graphs.html

This should keep me busy for a while!

By the way, the Baltimore Convention Center is next door to Camden Yards and also near the birthplace of Babe Ruth.

Sage Trees

New Sage Worksheet: Trees

I was updating a few things in Chapter 10, Trees, and took the opportunity to do a few things with Sage. ADS2_Trees.sws

• Cataloging trees by degree sequence.
• Finding a minimal spanning tree using Kruskal's algorithm.
• The binary tree sorting algorithm

Actually, the last item only uses Python.

Sage notebook on relations

I filled in for Al Doerr in his class this morning and he asked me to cover some material on relations. So I took that opportunity to figure out how to implement some relations in Sage. It went pretty well. One exception is that in squaring an adjacency matrix of a relation, I'd like to get a simple adjacency matrix with just 0's and 1's. The way I did the calculations, I got the numbers of different paths of length 2 connecting the vertices. That's fine except that the graphs of the squared relations become messy. If anyone knows how to fix this, I'd appreciate the help.

http://www.sagenb.org/home/pub/4715

Sage Notebooks

I just added the first in a series of Sage Notebooks related to Applied Discrete Structures in the wiki. I'm hoping this series might be developed by students in the coming year.