Schoonschip
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Schoonschip was one of the first computer algebra systems, developed in 1963 by Martinus J. G. Veltman, for use in particle physics.
Developer(s) | Martinus J. G. Veltman, Netherlands |
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Initial release | 1967, 56ā57 years ago[1] |
Written in | Assembly language |
Platform | Atari, Amiga, Sun 3/60, NeXT, and Macintosh computers, with 680x0 CPUs |
Type | Computer algebra system |
"Schoonschip" refers to the Dutch expression "schoon schip maken": to make a clean sweep, to clean/clear things up (literally: to make the ship clean). The name was chosen "among others to annoy everybody, who could not speak Dutch".
Veltman initially developed the program to compute the quadrupole moment of the W boson, the computation of which involved "a monstrous expression involving in the order of 50,000 terms in intermediate stages" [2]
The initial version, dating to December 1963, ran on an IBM 7094 mainframe.[3] In 1966 it was ported to the CDC 6600 mainframe, and later to most of the rest of Control Data's CDC line.[3] In 1983 it was ported to the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, allowing its use on a number of 68000-based systems running variants of Unix.[3]
FORM can be regarded, in a sense, as the successor to Schoonschip.
Contacts with Veltman about Schoonschip have been important for Stephen Wolfram in building Mathematica.[4]