News

The Magma webserver will be unavailable for most of November 9 due to an upgrade of networking equipment in the building.

We are advertising three 3-5-year positions at the University of Sydney to develop the Magma computer algebra system. Please consider applying.

Upgrading to macOS 15.0 (Sequoia) may cause Magma to no longer be authorised for use on that machine. This can be fixed by upgrading to V2.28-14 (or later); see [our FAQ entry on operating system upgrades](magma/faq/) for a workaround if that is not possible.

The Magma machines are undergoing upgrades between 2024-07-25 and 2024-07-30 (Australian time, inclusive). Some interruptions to normal service may occur, and emails and orders will not be responded to during this period.

The webserver has been replaced; some teething problems may persist for a few days. We are continuing to work on it.

Magma V2.26-1 and V2.26-2 contained a serious bug which occurred when parsing certain types of expressions involving sums of exponents (in a simple assignment or print statement at the top level only). This bug is fixed in V2.26-3. All users with V2.26-1 or V2.26-2 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to V2.26-3 as soon as possible.

The magma calculator is now working again after an unexpected failure over the holiday period.

The [site:magma/acknowledge/ Acknowledgements] section has been updated. (The distributed Handbook had the correct acknowledgements, but an oversight prevented this from being reflected in the web version.)

The Cremona database of elliptic curves has been updated to include a missing curve (406598c1; the former 406598c1 is now 406598d1).

The Cremona database of elliptic curves has been updated to conductor 499,999 and may be downloaded from the database page.

The Magma calculator is now available again.

The Magma calculator will be unavailable for a day due to another planned power outage to the building this weekend.

The Magma webserver is available again after a (planned) power outage to the building this weekend.

The electrical work has been completed, and the Magma webserver is now available again.

Due to electrical work in the building, the Magma webserver will be offline on Saturday 17th December.

The electrical work has been completed, and the calculator is now available again.

Update: We have arranged for power to be retained to the Magma webserver during the electrical work. However, the calculator will remain unavailable during this period. Normal service should resume by December 19.

Due to electrical work, the Magma webserver will be offline from the week starting Monday 15th December. Additionally, the Magma group will be unable to send or receive email for the duration of the shutdown. It is hoped that building power will be restored by the end of that week.

Our mail server died and we are experiencing some difficulties getting the new one working satisfactorily. If you have attempted to send us email and had it bounce, please try again in a day or so.

The Magma webserver is not, and has never been, vulnerable to the recently-discovered [http://heartbleed.com/ "Heartbleed"] vulnerability.

Magma V2.20 contains a new dense variant of the Faugere F4 algorithm for computing Groebner bases, which takes considerably less time and memory for several dense input systems.

Recent hardware troubles caused the website to be intermittently available from August 19 to August 21. Replacements have now been installed and the issues corrected.

We are delighted to announce that an [site:magma/simons_announce/ agreement] has recently been concluded between the Magma Group at the University of Sydney and the [http://www.simonsfoundation.org/ Simons Foundation] that will make Magma much more widely available within the US.

From V2.19-7 onwards, for the Intel64/Linux version an executable is available which supports Intel AVX instructions. This is applicable to most Intel processors released since 2012 (including the Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell architectures) with a Linux version which is suitably new (Kernel version 2.6.30 or later and GLIBC_2.7 or later). The AVX version runs significantly faster than the standard Intel64 version for several types of computation.

Note that Magma V2.19-5 includes a revised edition of the Magma Handbook (and the associated HTML version)

It has just been announced that [http://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/~danr/ Dan Roozemond], a Research Fellow in the group, is to be awarded the 2011 Schoonschipprijs in the Netherlands on October 7. The Schoonschip Stimulansprijs, on behalf of the Foundation CAN (Computer Algebra Nederland), is the annual prize for the best thesis that makes use of, or contributes to the development of, computer algebra. It is named after the program "Schoonschip" of Tini Veltman, one of the first symbolic algebra programs in the world.

Cheryl Praeger's article in The Australian's HES supplement (pg. 30, [http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/opinion-analysis/maths-subtracted-from-the-equation/story-e6frgcko-1225871250202 available online]) discusses how virtually every area of our lives depends on mathematics, and considers the importance of computer algebra systems such as Magma.

An exotic application of Magma to genetic engineering has just been posted [doi:10.1016/j.disc.2010.03.005 in Discrete Mathematics]. The paper by Smith, Abolution, Montemanni and Perkins uses Magma to construct tables of DNA codes. These codes are relevant to the design of synthetic DNA strands used in DNA micro arrays, as DNA tags in chemical libraries and in DNA computing.

Dr Dan Roozemond, who recently completed a PhD in Lie Theory at Eindhoven under Dr A M Cohen, has accepted an appointment as Research Fellow in the group. He is expected to take up his appointment around the end of May.

Dr Alexander Kasprzyk, who recently completed a post-doc with Gavin Brown at the University of Kent, arrives today to commence his appointment as a Research Fellow. Al's recent research interests include computational aspects of toric geometry and polytopes.

The book //[site:magma/dmwm/ Discovering Mathematics with Magma]// (eds. Bosma and Cannon) has now been published by Springer. This book presents 14 case studies of the application of Magma to problems in a variety of areas of mathematics. The Magma code appearing in this book is available for download.