Annual Spies Sage Development Prize
The Spies Sage Development Prize is an annual award worth $500 that will be given to a person who
makes major and inspiring contributions to the development of the Sage Mathematical Software
System. The goal of the prize is to acknowledge the recipient and to encourage him or
her to continue to do excellent development work on Sage. It is funded by donations to the Sage
Foundation by Jaap Spies, and cannot be awarded to the same person twice.
2011 Spies Prize: Robert Bradshaw
Robert Bradshaw has been an extremely active and productive Sage
developer for over five years. Additionally, he has been a leader,
both in maintaining the community and in important design decisions.
He is probably best known for his work on Cython, which is critical for
the performance of many key parts of Sage, and his work designing and
implementing the coercion model, which makes many powerful
mathematical constructions possible. However, his interests and
significant contributions are wide-ranging, including: exact linear
algebra, arithmetic of elliptic curves, L-functions, 3-D plotting and
parallel building. A recent project is the patchbot tool, which
automates testing contributions posted on trac. Moreover, he is an
important contributor to trouble-shooting and design discussions in
the sage-devel forum and is also the third most numerous poster of all
time in the sage-support forum.
For his many important technical contributions, and his long-time and
continuing involvement in the Sage community, Robert Bradshaw is
awarded the 2011 Spies Sage Development Prize. This award carries a prize
of $500 from the Sage Foundation (thanks to Jaap Spies).
2010 Spies Prize: Minh Van Nguyen
Minh Van Nguyen is an integral part of the Sage development effort.
He is awarded the 2010 Spies Development Prize in recognition of his
code contributions, release management, support for new users and
outstanding work on documentation.
Minh's mathematical interests are primarily in discrete mathematics
and he has contributed substantial new code and fixes to the Sage
library, especially for cryptography and graph theory. Minh assumed
release management duties in Summer 2009 and has diligently performed
this difficult task with calm and goodwill. The build system and
documentation of the release cycle have greatly benefited from his
involvement. Present in the sage-devel IRC channel at all hours, he
welcomes newcomers and patiently helps with the most basic questions
about mathematics, syntax and programming, in addition to frequenting
the forums. His meticulous work on documentation is legendary within
the Sage community. Doctests, tutorials, manuals and web pages have
all benefited from his detailed work and suggestions for major
improvements and innovations. His release tours are useful, accurate
and informative chronicles of Sage development.
For his consistently conscientious commitment to Sage development,
Minh Nguyen is the recipient of the 2010 Spies Development Prize.
This award carries a prize of $500 from the Sage Foundation (thanks to
Jaap Spies).
2009 Spies Prize: Michael Hansen
The 2009 Spies Sage Development Prize ($500) is awarded to
Michael Hansen for his work on redesigning the Sage documentation
system to use Sphinx, porting Sage's symbolics to Pynac, and his
massive contributions to the combinatorics codebase, which led to the
MuPAD-combinat community moving over to Sage. Over the last 3 years,
Hansen has also done extensive work refactoring the Sage notebook,
fixing bugs all over Sage, writing documentation, and restructing old
code. He has been an active leader in the Sage community, helping to
organize and participate in numerous Sage Days workshops, refereeing
hundreds of patches, and actively supporting users on the mailing
lists. Hansen's work on Sage consistently combines a humble and kind
demeanor with a brilliant knowledge of the Python eco-system.
2008 Spies Prize: Michael Abshoff
The first annual Spies Sage Development Prize is awarded to Michael Abshoff for
his superb work improving the overall quality of the sage development process, making numerous
high quality Sage releases, leading the way in drastically reducing memory leaks in Sage, and
porting Sage to run on Windows, Solaris and 64-bit OS X.