SageMath Prize (2015–)

The new SageMath Prize is funded by donations to Sage via OpenCollective. At least two prizes will be awarded each year to acknowledge and encourage:
The 2015–2021 prize committee was Eric Gourgoulhon, John Cremona, William Stein, Samuel Lelièvre, and Karl-Dieter Crisman. The committee has named 10 winners for their contributions during the period from 2015 until now. Each winner receives our congratulations and thanks, and also $300! The 10 prize winners appear below in alphabetical order, like mathematics paper authors.

2015–2021 SageMath Prize: E. Madison Bray

E. Madison Bray (they) is awarded the 2015–2021 SageMath Prize for numerous developments in the Sage code base, porting Sage to Microsoft Windows, improving the documentation of Sage, and organizing Sage Days.

2015–2021 SageMath Prize: Frédéric Chapoton

Frédéric Chapoton, IRMA (CNRS et Université de Strasbourg), is awarded the 2015–2021 SageMath Prize for incredible amounts of development contributions to the core codebase, especially regarding the migration from Python 2 to Python 3, high quality reviewing of trac tickets, general quality improvements and support of infrastructure.

2015–2021 SageMath Prize: Matthias Köppe

Matthias Köppe (he/him), UC Davis, is awarded the 2015–2021 SageMath Prize for incredible and consistent contributions to the core Sage library, especially the modularization effort, which has the potential to massively extend the sustainability and broad impact of the Sage Python codebase.

2015–2021 SageMath Prize: Thierry Monteil

Thierry Monteil, tmonteil, is awarded the 2015–2021 SageMath Prize for an extraordinary amount of user support and deploying and maintaining the thriving ask.sagemath.org server. Also, for spreading Sage via the Sage Debian Live USB key project and by strong participation in many Sage Days.

2015–2021 SageMath Prize: Andrey Novoseltsev

Andrey Novoseltsev is awarded the 2015–2021 SageMath Prize for long-term maintenance, support and development of the Sage cell server, which is the most immediately accessible way to run Sage. Also, for many contributions to UTMOST and PreTeXt.

2015–2021 SageMath Prize: Dima Pasechnik

Dmitrii Pasechnik (a.k.a. Dima), Department of CS, Oxford University, UK, is awarded the 2015–2021 SageMath Prize for overall contributions, including care of orphaned packages, thoughtful discussion of important issues on mailing lists, long-term math and code contributions, user support, support of Google Summer of Code and OpenCollective.

2015–2021 SageMath Prize: Viviane Pons

Viviane Pons (she/her), Université Paris-Saclay, is awarded the 2015–2021 SageMath Prize for community building, training, and Sage Days organization and outreach far and wide. Also for contributions to documentation and publicity about Sage via OpenDreamKit, and core contributions to the Sage codebase and related packages.

2015–2021 SageMath Prize: Harald Schilly

Harald Schilly (he/him), CoCalc, is awarded the 2015–2021 SageMath Prize for consistent contributions since 2007, including design and maintenance of the very functional Sage website (e.g., Sage is on the first page of Google for searching for "math software"), debugging and maintaining doc.sagemath.org, administering Sage's Google Summer of Code involvement, helping with OpenCollective, and maintaining many Sage distributions as part of CoCalc.

2015–2021 SageMath Prize: Travis Scrimshaw

Travis Scrimshaw (he/him), Osaka Metropolitan University, is awarded the 2015–2021 SageMath Prize for major contributions to the core library, his excellent review of trac tickets, and his major long-term contributions to Sage's participation in Google Summer of Code.

2015–2021 SageMath Prize: Nicolas M. Thiéry

Nicolas M. Thiéry (he/him), LISN, Université Paris-Saclay, is awarded the 2015–2021 SageMath Prize for having a massive impact on the development of Sage over the last decade by leading sage-combinat, his core code structure contributions (e.g., categories), and leading the OpenDreamKit grant. He was a driving force behind making Sage the world's best software for algebraic combinatorics.

Annual Spies SageMath Development Prize (2008–2014)

The Spies SageMath Development Prize was an annual award worth $500 that will be given to a person who makes major and inspiring contributions to the development of the SageMath Mathematical Software System. The goal of the prize was to acknowledge the recipient and to encourage him or her to continue to do excellent development work on SageMath. It was funded by donations to the SageMath Foundation by Jaap Spies, and cannot be awarded to the same person twice.

2014 Spies Prize: Volker Braun

Volker Braun is a key contributor to all aspects of SageMath development, contributing code and reviews for core mathematical functions and providing technical improvements to the build system and code maintenance. He has quickly become a central figure in the SageMath development community.
In his four years of involvement, Volker has moved from contributing code for cohomology of toric varieties to being the current release manager. Along the way, he has greatly improved the integration of GAP with libGAP, created and distributed virtual machine versions of SageMath and the SageMath notebook, managed much of the transition to git version control over the past nine months, and made numerous improvements to doctesting, the build system and overall code maintenance. He has fixed many difficult bugs, while also being a generous reviewer.
In recognition of his important and sustained contributions across all aspects of SageMath development, Volker Braun is awarded the 2014 Spies SageMath Development Prize. This award carries a prize of $500 from the SageMath Foundation (thanks to Jaap Spies)

2013 Spies Prize: Jeroen Demeyer

Jeroen Demeyer has provided excellent service to the SageMath community as release manager, starting with Version 4.6.1 in January 2011, just five months after his first code contribution. He has continued to contribute significant code to the SageMath library in the area of number theory, including over forty contributions related to the fundamental SageMath package of PARI.
Jeroen is everything the SageMath community could ask for in a release manager. He is a trusted custodian of the code and has built an impressive system for frequent beta and final releases. He works carefully with developers and users to balance the priorities of fast-paced cutting-edge development, backwards compatibility, portability, and high-quality software. During his tenure as release manager, he has earned great respect while making difficult decisions as he shaped the SageMath that the world sees. His efficient, timely, fair and knowledgeable work has won him the admiration of the SageMath development community and has rendered a great service to the much larger user community.
For his conscientious and technically excellent work as SageMath release manager, and his significant contributions to the SageMath library, Jeroen Demeyer is awarded the 2013 Spies Prize.

2012 Spies Prize: Jason Grout

Jason Grout is a constant presence across the SageMath landscape. He is extremely active in the discussion groups, comments on many tickets, contributes code to the core SageMath library, improves the documentation, and works tirelessly to improve the notebook interface. He contributes in many ways to make SageMath a better tool for mathematics research, but he is perhaps most recognized for his efforts to make SageMath an effective tool for teaching mathematics.
Jason's mathematical tastes have resulted in major code contributions for linear algebra, graph theory, plotting and symbolics. These are all important areas for the undergraduate mathematics curriculum. But he is equally interested in SageMath infrastructure, such as LaTeX representation, usability improvements to Trac server, format and delivery of documentation, and NumPy/SciPy integration. With a strong background in web applications, his work on the notebook interface is both visionary and technically strong. A recent project he runs is the SageMath Cell Server, which allows a remote server to accept SageMath code and return results without any account or login. This can power interactive demonstrations on web pages or computations via mobile devices, and the principles and implementations will be used in increasing the scalability of SageMath servers. As an example of his interest in education, this project has involved several undergraduate students in significant ways. Jason also gives freely of his time to help other users and developers. He is the second most numerous poster of all time in the sage-support forum, in the top five for the sage-devel, sage-edu and sage-notebook forums, and he has the fifth-highest karma at the Ask SageMath site.
For his significant and inspiring technical contributions, his massive contributions to the vitality of the SageMath community, his work on making SageMath available via the notebook and cell servers, and his interest in education, Jason Grout is awarded the 2012 Spies SageMath Development Prize. This award carries a prize of $500 from the SageMath Foundation (thanks to Jaap Spies).

2011 Spies Prize: Robert Bradshaw

Robert Bradshaw has been an extremely active and productive SageMath 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 SageMath, 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 SageMath community, Robert Bradshaw is awarded the 2011 Spies SageMath Development Prize. This award carries a prize of $500 from the SageMath Foundation (thanks to Jaap Spies).

2010 Spies Prize: Minh Van Nguyen

Minh Van Nguyen is an integral part of the SageMath 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 SageMath 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 SageMath 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 SageMath development.
For his consistently conscientious commitment to SageMath development, Minh Nguyen is the recipient of the 2010 Spies Development Prize. This award carries a prize of $500 from the SageMath Foundation (thanks to Jaap Spies).

2009 Spies Prize: Michael Hansen

The 2009 Spies SageMath Development Prize ($500) is awarded to Michael Hansen for his work on redesigning the SageMath documentation system to use Sphinx, porting SageMath's symbolics to Pynac, and his massive contributions to the combinatorics codebase, which led to the MuPAD-combinat community moving over to SageMath. Over the last 3 years, Hansen has also done extensive work refactoring the SageMath notebook, fixing bugs all over SageMath, writing documentation, and restructing old code. He has been an active leader in the SageMath community, helping to organize and participate in numerous SageMath Days workshops, refereeing hundreds of patches, and actively supporting users on the mailing lists. Hansen's work on SageMath 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 SageMath Development Prize is awarded to Michael Abshoff for his superb work improving the overall quality of the sage development process, making numerous high quality SageMath releases, leading the way in drastically reducing memory leaks in SageMath, and porting SageMath to run on Windows, Solaris and 64-bit OS X.