Sym Py vs Maxima for symbolic computation

[Alexander Lindsay]

My understanding is that sage offers interfaces to both sympy and Maxima. My interest is in symbolic solution of equations, often including ODEs and PDEs. Between sympy and Maxima, which is the richer package for symbolic computation? Which is undergoing more active development? I don't mean to offend developers of either package with my question. I really appreciate both groups contributions to the open source community. But I also want to know where I can best spend my time both in terms of use and potential development. I would like to get behind one package and stick with it for the long haul

[William Stein]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 2:34 PM, Alexander Lindsay <adli...@ncsu.edu> wrote:
> My understanding is that sage offers interfaces to both sympy and Maxima. My interest is in symbolic solution of equations, often including ODEs and PDEs. Between sympy and Maxima, which is the richer package for symbolic computation?

I think probably Maxima.

> Which is undergoing more active development?

Definitely Sympy by far. No question at all.

> I don't mean to offend developers of either package with my question. I really appreciate both groups contributions to the open source community. But I also want to know where I can best spend my time both in terms of use and potential development. I would like to get behind one package and stick with it for the long haul

Note that Sage also uses Ginac a lot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiNaC


>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-support" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-support...@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to sage-s...@googlegroups.com.
> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.



--
William (http://wstein.org)

[David Joyner]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 7:32 PM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 2:34 PM, Alexander Lindsay <adli...@ncsu.edu> wrote:
>> My understanding is that sage offers interfaces to both sympy and Maxima. My interest is in symbolic solution of equations, often including ODEs and PDEs. Between sympy and Maxima, which is the richer package for symbolic computation?
>
> I think probably Maxima.
>

In my experience, SymPy is vastly superior to Maxima in solving ODEs.

[Ralf Stephan]

The main problem facing Sympy may be performance, because they explicitly 

use Python for everything. It shows for example in https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues/2635

[Douglas Davis]

In my limited experience it is best to let Sage handle the symbolic computations explicitly.  Then specify sympy ( algorithm='sympy') as a check on important solutions or when the default gives an error.  When working on advanced problems it is always best to have a backup and a check on your results by using multiple methods.