Mathematical Functions Library

by Eviatar Bach for Sage Mathematical Software System

Sage interfaces with multiple third-party libraries, such as MPFR, GSL, GP/PARI, mpmath, and Maxima, for numerical evaluation of special functions. There are significant discrepancies between these backends in the performance for numerical approximations of the same expression. An initial benchmark reveals, for example, that calculating spherical_bessel_J(1, 5.2) with SciPy is over 100 times faster than with Maxima.