SymPy
=====

A Python library for symbolic mathematics.

http://code.google.com/p/sympy/

All people who contributed to SymPy by sending at least a patch or more (in
the order of the date of their first contribution): 
    Ondrej Certik <[email protected]>
    Fabian Seoane <[email protected]>
    Jurjen N.E. Bos <[email protected]>
    Mateusz Paprocki <[email protected]> 
    Marc-Etienne M.Leveille <[email protected]>
    Brian Jorgensen <[email protected]>
    Jason Gedge <[email protected]>
    Robert Schwarz <[email protected]>
    Pearu Peterson <[email protected]>
    Fredrik Johansson <[email protected]>
    Chris Wu <[email protected]>
    Kirill Smelkov <[email protected]>
    Ulrich Hecht <[email protected]>
    Goutham Lakshminarayan <[email protected]>

And many more people helped on the mailinglist, reported bugs etc.

License: New BSD License (see the LICENSE file for details)
covers all files in the sympy repository unless stated otherwise.

0. Download
-----------

svn checkout http://sympy.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ sympy

For other options (tarballs, debs, etc.), see the web page of SymPy.


1. Documentation and usage
--------------------------

Everything is at:

http://code.google.com/p/sympy/wiki/Documentation

If you don't want to read that, here is a short usage:

From this directory, start python and:
>>> from sympy import Symbol, cos
>>> x=Symbol('x')
>>> e=1/cos(x)
>>> print e.series(x,10)
1 + (1/2)*x**2 + (5/24)*x**4 + (61/720)*x**6 + (277/8064)*x**8 + O(x**10)

SymPy also comes with a console that is a simple wrapper around the
classic python console (or ipython when available) that loads the
sympy namespace and defines three symbols: x, y, z.

To start it issue:

  ./bin/isympy

from this directory if SymPy is not installed or simply

  isympy

if SymPy is installed somewhere in your PATH.


3. Tests
--------

to execute tests, run

./setup.py test

in the current directory.  You need to have py.test installed.


4. How to install py.test
-------------------------

If you use Debian, just install the python-codespeak-lib. Otherwise:

Execute in your home directory:

svn co http://codespeak.net/svn/py/dist py-dist

This will create a "py-dist" directory in you home dir. Add this line to
your .bashrc:

eval `python ~/py-dist/py/env.py`

Now you can call "py.test" from anywhere.

5. Clean
--------

To clean everything (thus getting the same tree as in the svn):

./setup.py clean


6. Brief History
----------------

SymPy was started by Ondrej Certik in 2005, he wrote some code during the
summer, then he wrote some more code during the summer 2006. In February 2007,
Fabian Seoane joined the project and helped fixed many things, contributed
documentation and made it alive again. 5 students improved SymPy incredibly
during the summer 2007 as part of the Google Summer of Code. Pearu Peterson
joined the development during the summer 2007 and he has made SymPy much more
competitive by rewriting the core from scratch, that has made it from 10x to
100x faster.