Here is some fantastic news. For the past few years, I’ve been involved in helping develop a computer algebra package called Nemo.jl in Julia, on which is built another big library, called Hecke.jl.
Well, a very large grant here in Germany just got approved which will continue to fund our work, and which even modestly expands the role of Julia in our collaboration, for at least 4 years, and up to 12 years!
I’ve written a blog post about the grant [1] and tried to fill in some details about where Julia fits in as far as the ANTIC component of that project is concerned (basically Hecke.jl + Nemo.jl and some C libraries, at this point).
Please bear in mind that this is a very large (mathematics) grant covering many things not at all Julia related. But, I was told that the referees really liked the Julia part of our proposal (called ANTIC), and in fact, one of the people advising the funding agency turned out to not only have heard of Julia, but was regularly using it, showing just how well Julia is penetrating the mathematical and computational communities!
Those of us working on ANTIC are very pleased with Julia and want to thank the Julia community for making our work so much fun!
This is really great news! It’s good to see others catching on. Using mathematical programs like this required learning a whole new language before. Even using Sage felt like a completely different language than Python because it could only wrap so far. Nemo using dispatch really brings it together to feel like it’s functionality in Julia, and I think that we’ve still only seen part of its full potential.
Great job guys, I hope to keep following your successes.
Herzlichen Glückwunsch!
In our research group in Hamburg we extensively use Julia and I promote it wherever I can. We are still not there that it is know in the same way as Matlab and Python, but lets see where we stand in 4 years.
I should probably also mention that the Central Software Project described in that blog post isn’t the only project in the grant which will make use of Julia! I’ll blog about the others eventually too.