World's most powerful symbolic manipulation computer program FORM is now available as open source
FORM, the world's most powerful computer program for the symbolic manipulation of large formulas, has been developed at Nikhef by Dr. Jos Vermaseren and continuously improved over the last 25 years. It is used by physicists all over the world for large and extremely difficult calculations. The fact that it is now available as open source under the GNU public license is a huge step towards the continuity and the further development of FORM, beyond contributions by its original creator Jos Vermaseren. The open source policy gives everybody access to the source code and allows others to make contributions to FORM's capabilities. This should guarantee FORM’s long term development and survival.
About FORM
FORM is used for many big physics and mathematics calculations, especially to make precision predictions for experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva and at other particle colliders. It has been developed at Nikhef by Dr. Jos Vermaseren, starting in 1984, as an improvement on Nobel prize winner Prof. Martinus Veltman’s program Schoonship. FORM’s first release stems from 1989. Since then, FORM has developed into a very powerful computer program that outperforms other more popular algebra computer programs by an order of magnitude or more in both speed and size of expressions. In addition there are now versions available that can run on multiple processors.
Prof. Nigel Glover, director of the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, Durham University, United Kingdom, wrote:
"FORM can evaluate in the blink of an eye computations that would take many years to simply write down on a piece of paper. FORM has become the tool of choice for the whole community working at the leading edge of applications of quantum field theory for particle phenomenology. There is no shred of doubt that FORM has enabled many of the most complex and demanding calculations in particle theory (...). One can safely say that without the large scale algebraic manipulation capabilities of FORM, the field would be set back by at least one order in perturbation theory."
About Jos Vermaseren, the creator of FORM
Jos Vermaseren has been a staff member in the Nikhef theory group since 1981. In 2007, he was awarded the prestigious German Humboldt-Research-Award for his research and development of FORM. Nobel prize winner Prof. David Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, wrote: "Vermaseren is an unusual scientist who has labored for most of his career in developing marvelous calculational tools (especially the computer algebra program FORM), which he makes available to all. He has also used these for very important calculations. I found his calculation of the QCD beta function to four loops to be an amazing tour de force."
More information
More information about Jos Vermaseren and FORM can be found at http://www.nikhef.nl/~form
The FORM source code can also be downloaded from these FORM pages, and there are links to the discussion forum.Both have been made possible due to the work of Dr. Jens Vollinga who was supported through a special Nikhef/FOM position.
Contact: Vanessa Mexner, science communication Nikhef, +31 (0)20 592 50 75.
Nikhef is a partnership between the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) and four universities: Radboud University Nijmegen, University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University and VU University Amsterdam. Nikhef is located at Science Park Amsterdam.