Electronic structure theory is a fascinating interdisciplinary field. Physics, chemistry, materials science, mathematics, high-performance computing ... they're all in it. Rooted at the quantum-mechanical description of electrons it is the backbone for quite a few simulation methods in the chemical and physical sciences. Here we'll focus on the numerical tools required to solve standard problems in the field like density-functional theory, which --- as we will see --- is challenging in itself.

Julia has a growing presence in the computational chemistry and materials science communities, already exhibiting best-in-class performance in several domains. However, a common set of tools, datatypes, and norms are largely lacking at present. In this session, we will have discussions to build consensus around a vision for such tools, with an emphasis on reusable structures/workflows, such as I/O for common file types, bindings for widely-used codes from other languages, and mathematical tools.