Number of Sage Users?

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no, there is nothing the like. one possible way to get numbers would be to implement a feature that checks if the currently running sage instance is the most recent one and tells the user to update if it is not. then, if the clients send a unique id, one could do statistics with the data. but there is nothing the like going on. so, the best estimate is probably the number of messages on the sage-support mailing list, multiplied with a number of your choice >1 ;)

Other possible measures which might be more or less feasible are:

1. Measure web traffic at sagemath.org, especially around the Downloads and documentation sections. Although sage comes with its own documentation, I suspect that a lot of users gravitate toward the online version because that's what google finds.

2. Measure usage of the public notebook servers

3. Put a poll on sagemath.org, with questions which could help determine the mystery ratios of how many sage users subscribe to sage-support, or how frequently people download new binary distributions.

4. Another eventual way to get numbers would be through the notebook -- something like a popup for the first time the notebook is run with a short explanation and buttons like "Yes, send anonymous usage data to sagemath.org", "No, never send data to sagemath.org", and "Not right now, but ask me again later." Although some users might prefer the command line eventually, I think it's a safe bet that the vast majority will open the notebook at least once.

p.s. I think an upgrade reminder is a useful idea anyway -- when I started using sage, I had no idea how quickly new versions are released!

I really wonder about this myself. The highest subscription mailing list appears to be sage-support, which at this moment has 1898 members. I would imagine that most people subscribing to the other groups also watch sage-support. But obviously I could be very wrong. I guess the overlap between groups is something that could be discovered. Then the question is, are there really a lot of people out there who use Sage but don't subscribe to the group(s). Does anyone have an opinion about the ratio?

This is interesting. It appears that there are only 1852 people who watch the Mathematica list through Google groups. Of course that could be a small fraction of the people who actually subscribe the mailing list. Also I don't really know where that number comes from. If you go to one of the math related goups, and look at the link for "related groups" then it gives you a number. For example: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.soft-sys.math.maple/related?lnk=rghm