Currently, there are approaching 2,000 Magma sites spread across more than 70 countries. About 90% of these are university departments while the remaining 10% are research institutes, companies, and government organisations. For example, most mathematics departments in Japan and Germany use Magma.
An online calculator provides free access to Magma for time-limited runs. There is an average of 4,000 sessions every 24 hours; at the high point there have beeen as many as 35,000 such sessions. This facility is used by many thousands of researchers and students.
Magma has been chosen as the primary software for many challenging projects on the basis of its performance. On hard problems such as solving large or difficult systems of polynomial equations it is far superior to its competitors and consequently is the only algorithm-and-implementation combination that can solve a range of such problems.
The Simons Foundation of New York covers the cost of Magma use in US colleges and universities. So far about 250 institutions have enrolled, some of whom have made Magma available across the entire institution. Of the 50 top mathematics departments in the US, 47 have elected to use Magma in their research.
Magma is used extensively in high-tech countries such as France, Germany, Japan, the US, and the UK. However, within Australia it is hardly used outside of the universities of Western Australia and Sydney.
Magma is used heavily by people working in various areas of communications, particularly in the fields of error-correcting codes and cryptography.
Magma has been used to disprove a large number of conjectures, complete the proofs of hundreds of theorems, and assist many mathematicians to formulate proofs of theorems.
There are at least 5,000 publications that cite the use of Magma in the research. A sample of almost 3,000 such citations published by 2011 may be viewed here.
Here are a few examples of results obtained using Magma.