The stated mission of Sage is to be viable free open source
alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab. Sage’s
predecessors, known as HECKE and Manin, came about because
William Stein needed to write them as part of his research in
number theory. Started by William in 2005 during his time at
Harvard University, Sage combines best-of-breed free open source
mathematics software, packaging and unifying them through a
common interface. Many researchers in number theory, including
William himself, use this common interface to build upon and
extend the functionalities of underlying packages for number
theory research. Such software packages include Givaro, MPIR,
NTL, Pari/GP, and many others too numerous to list here.
Students, teachers, professors, researchers throughout the world
use Sage because they require a comprehensive free open source
mathematics package that offers symbolic and numerical
computation. Most of the time, people are happy with what Sage
has to offer. As is common throughout the free