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.

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.

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.