Edit detail for HistoricAxiom revision 4 of 4

History

FriCAS has it origin in long developement in IBM laboratories. First, it was called Scratchpad. Inn 1976 project changed to new design and was named Scratchpad II. Scratchpad II was developed under direction of Richard Jenks. Barry Trager was key to the technical direction of the project. Scratchpad developed over many years and was basically considered as a research platform for developing new ideas in computational mathematics. Mathematical part of Scratchpad was written in strongly typed language called Spad. Sligtly more permissive variant was used as main user language. Original Spad compiler was developed very early during Scratchpad II lifecycle. It was improved later, but there were several attempts to replace it by newer code. Most successful candidate was Aldor

In the 1990s, as IBM's fortunes slid, the Scratchpad project was renamed to Axiom, sold to the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) in England and became a commercial system. As part of the Scratchpad project at IBM in Yorktown Tim Daly worked on all aspects of the system and eventually helped transfer the product to NAG. For a variety of reasons it never became a financial success and NAG withdrew it from the market in October, 2001.

Open Source

NAG agreed to release Axiom as free software, under this license.

The basic motivation was that Axiom represents something different from other programs in a lot of ways. Primarily because of its foundation in mathematics the Axiom system will potentially be useful 30 years from now. In its current state it represents about 30 years and 300 man-years of research work. To strive to keep such a large collection of knowledge alive seems a worthwhile goal.

Unfortunatly, free Axiom was released without Aldor. Aldor was released under open source licence in 2013, but at that time there was substantial developement in old Spad compiler. ATM is not clear which developement line is more promising: Aldor or old Spad compiler.

Early open source developent was led by Tim Daly. Tim wanted developers to use Knuth-style Literate Programming

Below is official list of goals in 2002-2007 period:

• develop a better user interface
• make it useful as a teaching tool
• develop an algebra server protocol
• integrate additional mathematics
• rebuild the algebra in a Literate Programming style
• integrate logic programming
• develop an Axiom Journal with refereed submissions.

Axiom Forks

In 2007 open sorce Axiom project forked twice, leading to three independent projects, see ForksInfo

List of Axiom Contributors

The following is a fairly complete list of people who have contributed to the development of Axiom over it's long history up to 2007.

Many of these people are still actively involved with Axiom. Some however have already passed beyond these mortal concerns and we can only silently thank them for this wonderful legacy!

(1) -> )credits

An alphabetical listing of contributors to AXIOM (to October, 2006):
Cyril Alberga          Roy Adler              Christian Aistleitner
Richard Anderson       George Andrews
Henry Baker            Stephen Balzac         Yurij Baransky
David R. Barton        Gerald Baumgartner     Gilbert Baumslag
Fred Blair             Vladimir Bondarenko    Mark Botch
Alexandre Bouyer       Peter A. Broadbery     Martin Brock
Manuel Bronstein       Florian Bundschuh      Luanne Burns
William Burge
Quentin Carpent        Robert Caviness        Bruce Char
Cheekai Chin           David V. Chudnovsky    Gregory V. Chudnovsky
Josh Cohen             Christophe Conil       Don Coppersmith
George Corliss         Robert Corless         Gary Cornell
Meino Cramer           Claire Di Crescenzo
Timothy Daly Sr.       Timothy Daly Jr.       James H. Davenport
Jean Della Dora        Gabriel Dos Reis       Michael Dewar
Claire DiCrescendo     Sam Dooley             Lionel Ducos
Martin Dunstan         Brian Dupee            Dominique Duval
Robert Edwards         Heow Eide-Goodman      Lars Erickson
Richard Fateman        Bertfried Fauser       Stuart Feldman
Brian Ford             Albrecht Fortenbacher  George Frances
Constantine Frangos    Timothy Freeman        Korrinn Fu
Marc Gaetano           Rudiger Gebauer        Kathy Gerber
Patricia Gianni        Holger Gollan          Teresa Gomez-Diaz
Laureano Gonzalez-Vega Stephen Gortler        Johannes Grabmeier
Matt Grayson           James Griesmer         Vladimir Grinberg
Oswald Gschnitzer      Jocelyn Guidry
Steve Hague            Vilya Harvey           Satoshi Hamaguchi
Martin Hassner         Waldek Hebisch         Ralf Hemmecke
Henderson              Antoine Hersen
Pietro Iglio
Richard Jenks
Kai Kaminski           Grant Keady            Tony Kennedy
Paul Kosinski          Klaus Kusche           Bernhard Kutzler
Larry Lambe            Frederic Lehobey       Michel Levaud
Howard Levy            Rudiger Loos           Michael Lucks
Richard Luczak
Camm Maguire           Bob McElrath           Michael McGettrick
Ian Meikle             David Mentre           Victor S. Miller
Gerard Milmeister      Mohammed Mobarak       H. Michael Moeller
Michael Monagan        Marc Moreno-Maza       Scott Morrison
Mark Murray
William Naylor         C. Andrew Neff         John Nelder
Godfrey Nolan          Arthur Norman          Jinzhong Niu
Michael O'Connor       Kostas Oikonomou
Julian A. Padget       Bill Page              Susan Pelzel
Michel Petitot         Didier Pinchon         Jose Alfredo Portes
Claude Quitte
Norman Ramsey          Michael Richardson     Renaud Rioboo
Jean Rivlin            Nicolas Robidoux       Simon Robinson
Michael Rothstein      Martin Rubey
Philip Santas          Alfred Scheerhorn      William Schelter
Gerhard Schneider      Martin Schoenert       Marshall Schor
Frithjof Schulze       Fritz Schwarz          Nick Simicich
William Sit            Elena Smirnova         Jonathan Steinbach
Christine Sundaresan   Robert Sutor           Moss E. Sweedler
Eugene Surowitz
James Thatcher         Balbir Thomas          Mike Thomas
Dylan Thurston         Barry Trager           Themos T. Tsikas
Gregory Vanuxem
Bernhard Wall          Stephen Watt           Jaap Weel
Juergen Weiss          M. Weller              Mark Wegman
James Wen              Thorsten Werther       Michael Wester
John M. Wiley          Berhard Will           Clifton J. Williamson
Stephen Wilson         Shmuel Winograd        Robert Wisbauer
Sandra Wityak          Waldemar Wiwianka      Knut Wolf
Clifford Yapp          David Yun
Richard Zippel         Evelyn Zoernack        Bruno Zuercher
Dan Zwillinger