• ### Announcement - Looking for New Abelfunctions Owners

As much as I would like to keep hacking on Abelfunctions I doubt that I will have time to do so once I have a “real job”. Too many student projects evaporate into the ether. Therefore, I am hoping someone will take the mantle of this project and guide it to a better state.

Though not required, since I assume you’re a bright mathematician, but experience in the following would help in developing for Abelfunctions: (in order of importance)

• Python / Sage
• Object-Oriented programming
• Cython
• git / GitHub

Of course, an appropriate mathematical background is needed. This project performs calculations that use the following:

• algebraic geometry / planar curves
• numerical analysis
• computational geometry
• special functions (in particular, the Riemann theta function)

## Help

If you are interested in taking on this project I would be happy to meet with you via Facetime, Google Hangouts, Skype, or whatever your preferred video chat + screensharing method. I tried to document my code well but as some Ph.D. research projects the rush of arriving at certain checkpoints causes documentation and clarity take a hit while searching for correctness.

Additionally, it’s not like I will cease to exist. I will be around to offer the occasional guidance and opinion.

• ### Transitioning to Native Sage Datatypes

Nils Bruin at Simon Fraser University brought up the idea / request to compute period matrices of plane curves to high precision. Sage has built-in capabilities to work with arbitrary-precision complex numbers via the CC ring. It also implements complex doubles in the the CDF ring.

In the original version of Abelfunctions I decided to use Numpy + Cython for numerical performance. Now I’m wondering if it’s worth investigating using native Sage datatypes instead. Below, I perform some timings between different fast_callable declarations, where the domain is varied, and different input datatypes: numpy.complex, CDF, and CC.

## Timings

The fastest result using only native Sage datatypes is f_CDF(a_CDF, b_CDF). This is only about x2 slower than directly during f_CDF.call_f(...) with native C complex datatypes. (Here, f_CDF is of type Wrapper_cdf which provides low-level access to the underlying JIT-compiled C function.) That is, by using native C get a x2 performance increase from the fastest native Sage version. Given that the pure-CDF version is already x100 faster than a non-CDF implementation I don’t think it’s worth the last bit of performance if it means easier to read code. (Not to mention, the ease of transitioning to using CC.)

It will be challenging refactoring the numerics code for Sage. I will most likely not do anything about it until I’m done with my Ph.D. but it’s worth investigating in the future.

• ### A Genus 43 Curve - Riemann Matrix

Consider the genus $43$ Riemann surface $X$ obtained from the desingularization and compactification of the plane algebraic curve

The Riemann matrix (normalized period matrix) of this curve is given by:

(Click to expand.) This matrix is indeed symmetric and its imaginary part is positive definite.