History of sympy

[Lokesh Sharma]

Hi,

I have been thinking of sympy from so many days now and curious to know about its history.

If someone could shed some light on these questions, I would be really grateful to him/her:

1. Why and with what view in mind was sympy created?

2. How did it became so popular? (Popular because it has fair amount of people contributing to it. One reason I can think of is that it does everything in professional manner.)

3. What about the future? Ultimately what is it that you want sympy to become?

[Lokesh Sharma]

Basically I am interesting in knowing how it came about, what inspired the creator to built it. I am aware that its a symbolic computation library which can be used for scientific purposes but wish to know more about it.

[Aaron Meurer]

Ondrej will have to give the definitive answer to number 1, but I
believe he needed it to do his work as a physics grad student.

For 2, I think the best answer is described at
http://ondrejcertik.blogspot.com/2009/05/my-experience-with-running-opensource.html.
That, and Google Summer of Code.

For 3, the goal is the same as it's always been, for SymPy to be a
full featured computer algebra system written in Python, that is easy
to use and extend.

Aaron Meurer

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[Ondřej Čertík]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 2:47 PM, Aaron Meurer <asme...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ondrej will have to give the definitive answer to number 1, but I
> believe he needed it to do his work as a physics grad student.

As an undergrad student. I wanted a simple to use library in Python so
that I can write Python programs to play with physics problems, for
example in General Relativity.

>
> For 2, I think the best answer is described at
> http://ondrejcertik.blogspot.com/2009/05/my-experience-with-running-opensource.html.
> That, and Google Summer of Code.

I read it, and it is still accurate, almost 6 years later.

>
> For 3, the goal is the same as it's always been, for SymPy to be a
> full featured computer algebra system written in Python, that is easy
> to use and extend.

Yes. My goal is to also provide tools to make it the fastest computer
algebra system, which we do via CSymPy.

Ondrej