[Axiom-developer] Axiom Tenth Anniversary on August 11,2010

[Tim Daly]

Axiom was originally developed at IBM Research under Dr. Richard
Jenks. The project went through several generations and had many
contributors. It was the one of the leading research projects at
the lab. Eventually IBM's fortunes changed and Axiom was sold to
the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG). For a while it was one of
"the big three" (along with Mathematica and Maple) commercial
systems.

In August of 2000 (August 11th, I believe) I had a conversation
with my son, Tim Daly Jr., who had called me to tell me that
Bill Schelter died.

I had worked with Bill on GCL (then called AKCL). Bill was under
contract to IBM to develop a lisp that would support Axiom. He
and I worked closely together on it. Bill not only built a lisp
to support Axiom but he worked to get a copy of Maxima as open
source.

I called Barry Trager, an IBM coworker and one of the fundamental
contributors to Axiom, to tell him about Bill. Barry told me that
NAG planned to remove Axiom from the commercial market.

I called NAG and they confirmed that they were going to stop
selling Axiom commercially. I asked them to release it as open
source and said that I would do what was necessary to make it
into freely available software.

NAG spent a considerable amount of time and effort to release
Axiom under the BSD license. They deserve a lot of credit for
ensuring that Axiom lives on. It took about a year to get the
CD containing the released sources. For various reasons there
were "missing parts" of the commercial version including the
techexplorer front-end, the numerics, and the Aldor compiler.

During that year there was a lot of debate about the goals
of Axiom. The open source version of Axiom was intended to be a
research platform, with no attempt to compete with commercial
offerings. Axiom's fundamental weakness as open source revolved
around the lack of deep documentation. The algorithms are hard,
the whole system internal structure was obscure, and the build
process was black magic. Some system internals were written in a
language nobody spoke. In order to correct these flaws the
focus was on completely rewriting the system, using literate
programming to provide a basis for integrating documentation
and code. Since Axiom is nearly a million "things of code" this
was expected to take a while (and is still ongoing 10 years later).

Axiom required a running copy of Axiom to build itself. But an
open source version could not assume the user already had Axiom.
So the fundamental problem was how to get around this circular issue.
This represented a major stumbling block that consumed a large portion
of the time from the CD release until the first open source
version "went live". The lattice of 1100 objects had to be
sorted, an inner clique of co-dependent objects had to be found,
and a method of building this clique and lattice needed to be
invented. Solving this problem took up most of the time from the
release. A second issue was that the commercial version ran on a
byte-coded interpreted lisp which I could not get to build. Axiom
moved back to AKCL (now GCL) with the help of Camm Maguire. All of
this work was supported by Dr. Gilbert Baumslag (CCNY).

Today Axiom consists of 20 books which contain a large portion
of the literate source code. There is an associated video and
more are planned. Axiom has been validated against two
major test suites and a third suite is in process. Axiom has
more tests, more documentation, a simplified build system, a
single lisp-based internal langage, new algebra, the beginnings
of a numerics library, and a firefox front end. It is freely
available on savannah (GNU), sourceforge, and github. It is
downloaded thousands of times per month. It is used by researchers
worldwide. Work still remains and "The 30 Year Horizon" doesn't
seem to be any closer but the progress is obvious.

Axiom is the work of these 226 people, over a lifespan of
nearly 40 years. The people who have contributed to it, as clearly
as we can determine, are listed here. Some of them have already
passed away, including Dr. Richard Jenks, the founding father of
Axiom. This makes it all the more important that we document the
work so the next generation can carry on to "The 30 Year Horizon".

An alphabetical listing of contributors to AXIOM:

Cyril Alberga          Roy Adler              Christian Aistleitner
Richard Anderson       George Andrews         S.J. Atkins
Henry Baker            Martin Baker           Stephen Balzac
Yurij Baransky         David R. Barton        Gerald Baumgartner
Gilbert Baumslag       Michael Becker         Nelson H. F. Beebe
Jay Belanger           David Bindel           Fred Blair
Vladimir Bondarenko    Mark Botch             Alexandre Bouyer
Peter A. Broadbery     Martin Brock           Manuel Bronstein
Stephen Buchwald       Florian Bundschuh      Luanne Burns
William Burge
Quentin Carpent        Robert Caviness        Bruce Char
Ondrej Certik          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
David Cyganski
Nathaniel Daly         Timothy Daly Sr.       Timothy Daly Jr.
James H. Davenport     Didier Deshommes       Michael Dewar
Jean Della Dora        Gabriel Dos Reis       Claire DiCrescendo
Sam Dooley             Lionel Ducos           Lee Duhem
Martin Dunstan         Brian Dupee            Dominique Duval
Robert Edwards         Heow Eide-Goodman      Lars Erickson
Richard Fateman        Bertfried Fauser       Stuart Feldman
John Fletcher          Brian Ford             Albrecht Fortenbacher
George Frances         Constantine Frangos    Timothy Freeman
Korrinn Fu
Marc Gaetano           Rudiger Gebauer        Kathy Gerber
Patricia Gianni        Samantha Goldrich      Holger Gollan
Teresa Gomez-Diaz      Laureano Gonzalez-Vega Stephen Gortler
Johannes Grabmeier     Matt Grayson           Klaus Ebbe Grue
James Griesmer         Vladimir Grinberg      Oswald Gschnitzer
Jocelyn Guidry
Gaetan Hache           Steve Hague            Satoshi Hamaguchi
Mike Hansen            Richard Harke          Bill Hart
Vilya Harvey           Martin Hassner         Arthur S. Hathaway
Dan Hatton             Waldek Hebisch         Karl Hegbloom
Ralf Hemmecke          Henderson              Antoine Hersen
Gernot Hueber
Pietro Iglio
Alejandro Jakubi       Richard Jenks
Kai Kaminski           Grant Keady            Tony Kennedy
Ted Kosan              Paul Kosinski          Klaus Kusche
Bernhard Kutzler
Tim Lahey              Larry Lambe            Kaj Laurson
Franz Lehner           Frederic Lehobey       Michel Levaud
Howard Levy            Liu Xiaojun            Rudiger Loos
Michael Lucks          Richard Luczak
Camm Maguire           Francois Maltey        Alasdair McAndrew
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         Joel Moses
Mark Murray
William Naylor         Patrice Naudin         C. Andrew Neff
John Nelder            Godfrey Nolan          Arthur Norman
Jinzhong Niu
Michael O'Connor       Summat Oemrawsingh     Kostas Oikonomou
Humberto Ortiz-Zuazaga
Julian A. Padget       Bill Page              David Parnas
Susan Pelzel           Michel Petitot         Didier Pinchon
Ayal Pinkus            Jose Alfredo Portes
Claude Quitte
Arthur C. Ralfs        Norman Ramsey          Anatoly Raportirenko
Albert D. Rich         Michael Richardson     Renaud Rioboo
Jean Rivlin            Nicolas Robidoux       Simon Robinson
Raymond Rogers         Michael Rothstein      Martin Rubey
Philip Santas          Alfred Scheerhorn      William Schelter
Gerhard Schneider      Martin Schoenert       Marshall Schor
Frithjof Schulze       Fritz Schwarz          Steven Segletes
Nick Simicich          William Sit            Elena Smirnova
Jonathan Steinbach     Fabio Stumbo           Christine Sundaresan
Robert Sutor           Moss E. Sweedler       Eugene Surowitz
Max Tegmark            James Thatcher         Balbir Thomas
Mike Thomas            Dylan Thurston         Steve Toleque
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
Vadim Zhytnikov        Richard Zippel         Evelyn Zoernack
Bruno Zuercher         Dan Zwillinger