Make Your Calculus Life Easier with Sage!

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It's Sage Week!

This week is Sage Week at Calculus Center! We are going to spend the week teaching you about Sage and how it can make learning Calculus a whole lot easier. In fact, after this week we think Sage will become your tool of choice for solving Calculus problems. In this first email we will tell you what Sage is and how to get it. (Don't worry it is 100% FREE!) On Tuesday we will teach you how to plot functions with Sage. On Wednesday we will teach you how to solve derivatives with Sage. On Thursday, we will teach you how to solve integrals with it. Finally, on Friday we are going to list some other things that Sage can do for Calculus students. By the end of the week you will have a working knowledge of Sage and be able to use it to solve homework problems quickly and easily.

What is Sage?

Sage is a FREE software package that combines a lot of other FREE software packages together to solve math problems quickly and easily.  Think of it as equivalent to Mathematica or any other commercially available software, but for free.  More importantly, you don't have to worry about installing it!  Sage is available online through SageMathCloud which is supported by the University of Washington, the National Science Foundation and Google.  This means you have the smartest people on the planet supporting a platform that you can use for FREE 24/7 to solve almost any math problem.  This alone should convince you to check it out.

How do I get started?

Let's get straight to the point and guide you to creating an account and your first project:

  • Click the "create an account" link in the grey box on the right.
  • Fill out the form and click the green "Create and account for free" button.

  • The work that you do will be done in a 'project'.  To create your first project click the blue "New Project" button.  This will create a project that we will use for the rest of the week.

  • Now a form will appear for you to put in information about your project.  In the 'Title' field put 'Calculus Center' so you know this project is to copy what we do this week.  You can make the project public or private.  It defaults to public so just keep it there for the moment.  You can change this later if you want.  Once you have put in the title click the blue "Create Project" button.

  • You will now be taken back to the projects page.  Notice up in the top, right-hand corner a box that says "Creating new project 'Calculus Center'.  This takes about 30 seconds.'  Once SageMathCloud has done whatever it does behind the scenes to create your project you will see a link with your project's title appear under "Showing projects".
  • Now you can click on the "Calculus Center" link.  This will take you to your project.




Congratulations!  You have successfully created an account and your first project.

Tomorrow we will talk about graphing functions with Sage. Finally, if you want to jump to the other blog posts for Sage Week then here they are: