A computer algebra system written in pure Python
SymPy
See the AUTHORS file for the list of authors.
And many more people helped on the SymPy mailing list, reported bugs,
helped organize SymPy’s participation in the Google Summer of Code, the
Google Highly Open Participation Contest, Google Code-In, wrote and
blogged about SymPy…
License: New BSD License (see the LICENSE file for details) covers all
files in the sympy repository unless stated otherwise.
Our mailing list is at
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/sympy.
We have a community chat at Gitter. Feel
free to ask us anything there. We have a very welcoming and helpful
community.
Download
The recommended installation method is through Anaconda,
https://www.anaconda.com/products/distribution
You can also get the latest version of SymPy from
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sympy/
To get the git version do
$ git clone https://github.com/sympy/sympy.git
For other options (tarballs, debs, etc.), see
https://docs.sympy.org/dev/install.html.
Documentation and Usage
For in-depth instructions on installation and building the
documentation, see the SymPy Documentation Style Guide.
Everything is at:
You can generate everything at the above site in your local copy of
SymPy by:
$ cd doc
$ make html
Then the docs will be in _build/html. 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, 0, 10))
1 + x**2/2 + 5*x**4/24 + 61*x**6/720 + 277*x**8/8064 + 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 executes some common commands for you.
To start it, issue:
$ bin/isympy
from this directory, if SymPy is not installed or simply:
$ isympy
if SymPy is installed.
Installation
SymPy has a hard dependency on the mpmath library
(version >= 0.19). You should install it first, please refer to the
mpmath installation guide:
https://github.com/fredrik-johansson/mpmath#1-download--installation
To install SymPy using PyPI, run the following command:
$ pip install sympy
To install SymPy using Anaconda, run the following command:
$ conda install -c anaconda sympy
To install SymPy from GitHub source, first clone SymPy using git:
$ git clone https://github.com/sympy/sympy.git
Then, in the sympy repository that you cloned, simply run:
$ pip install .
See https://docs.sympy.org/dev/install.html for more information.
Contributing
We welcome contributions from anyone, even if you are new to open
source. Please read our Introduction to Contributing
page and the SymPy Documentation Style Guide. If you
are new and looking for some way to contribute, a good place to start is
to look at the issues tagged Easy to Fix.
Please note that all participants in this project are expected to follow
our Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide
by its terms. See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.
Tests
To execute all tests, run:
$./setup.py test
in the current directory.
For the more fine-grained running of tests or doctests, use bin/test
or respectively bin/doctest. The master branch is automatically tested
by GitHub Actions.
To test pull requests, use
sympy-bot.
Regenerate Experimental LaTeX Parser/Lexer
The parser and lexer were generated with the ANTLR4
toolchain in sympy/parsing/latex/_antlr and checked into the repo.
Presently, most users should not need to regenerate these files, but
if you plan to work on this feature, you will need the antlr4
command-line tool (and you must ensure that it is in your PATH).
One way to get it is:
$ conda install -c conda-forge antlr=4.11.1
Alternatively, follow the instructions on the ANTLR website and download
the antlr-4.11.1-complete.jar. Then export the CLASSPATH as instructed
and instead of creating antlr4 as an alias, make it an executable file
with the following contents:
#!/bin/bash
java -jar /usr/local/lib/antlr-4.11.1-complete.jar "$@"
After making changes to sympy/parsing/latex/LaTeX.g4, run:
$ ./setup.py antlr
Clean
To clean everything (thus getting the same tree as in the repository):
$ git clean -Xdf
which will clear everything ignored by .gitignore, and:
$ git clean -df
to clear all untracked files. You can revert the most recent changes in
git with:
$ git reset --hard
WARNING: The above commands will all clear changes you may have made,
and you will lose them forever. Be sure to check things with git status, git diff, git clean -Xn, and git clean -n before doing any
of those.
Bugs
Our issue tracker is at https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues. Please
report any bugs that you find. Or, even better, fork the repository on
GitHub and create a pull request. We welcome all changes, big or small,
and we will help you make the pull request if you are new to git (just
ask on our mailing list or Gitter Channel). If you further have any queries, you can find answers
on Stack Overflow using the sympy tag.
Brief History
SymPy was started by Ondřej Čertík in 2005, he wrote some code during
the summer, then he wrote some more code during summer 2006. In February
2007, Fabian Pedregosa joined the project and helped fix many things,
contributed documentation, and made it alive again. 5 students (Mateusz
Paprocki, Brian Jorgensen, Jason Gedge, Robert Schwarz, and Chris Wu)
improved SymPy incredibly during 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, which has made it from 10x to 100x faster. Jurjen N.E. Bos
has contributed pretty-printing and other patches. Fredrik Johansson has
written mpmath and contributed a lot of patches.
SymPy has participated in every Google Summer of Code since 2007. You
can see https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki#google-summer-of-code for
full details. Each year has improved SymPy by bounds. Most of SymPy’s
development has come from Google Summer of Code students.
In 2011, Ondřej Čertík stepped down as lead developer, with Aaron
Meurer, who also started as a Google Summer of Code student, taking his
place. Ondřej Čertík is still active in the community but is too busy
with work and family to play a lead development role.
Since then, a lot more people have joined the development and some
people have also left. You can see the full list in doc/src/aboutus.rst,
or online at:
https://docs.sympy.org/dev/aboutus.html#sympy-development-team
The git history goes back to 2007 when development moved from svn to hg.
To see the history before that point, look at
https://github.com/sympy/sympy-old.
You can use git to see the biggest developers. The command:
$ git shortlog -ns
will show each developer, sorted by commits to the project. The command:
$ git shortlog -ns --since="1 year"
will show the top developers from the last year.
Citation
To cite SymPy in publications use
Meurer A, Smith CP, Paprocki M, Čertík O, Kirpichev SB, Rocklin M,
Kumar A, Ivanov S, Moore JK, Singh S, Rathnayake T, Vig S, Granger BE,
Muller RP, Bonazzi F, Gupta H, Vats S, Johansson F, Pedregosa F, Curry
MJ, Terrel AR, Roučka Š, Saboo A, Fernando I, Kulal S, Cimrman R,
Scopatz A. (2017) SymPy: symbolic computing in Python. PeerJ Computer
Science 3:e103 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.103
A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
@article{10.7717/peerj-cs.103,
title = {SymPy: symbolic computing in Python},
author = {Meurer, Aaron and Smith, Christopher P. and Paprocki, Mateusz and \v{C}ert\'{i}k, Ond\v{r}ej and Kirpichev, Sergey B. and Rocklin, Matthew and Kumar, Amit and Ivanov, Sergiu and Moore, Jason K. and Singh, Sartaj and Rathnayake, Thilina and Vig, Sean and Granger, Brian E. and Muller, Richard P. and Bonazzi, Francesco and Gupta, Harsh and Vats, Shivam and Johansson, Fredrik and Pedregosa, Fabian and Curry, Matthew J. and Terrel, Andy R. and Rou\v{c}ka, \v{S}t\v{e}p\'{a}n and Saboo, Ashutosh and Fernando, Isuru and Kulal, Sumith and Cimrman, Robert and Scopatz, Anthony},
year = 2017,
month = Jan,
keywords = {Python, Computer algebra system, Symbolics},
abstract = {
SymPy is an open-source computer algebra system written in pure Python. It is built with a focus on extensibility and ease of use, through both interactive and programmatic applications. These characteristics have led SymPy to become a popular symbolic library for the scientific Python ecosystem. This paper presents the architecture of SymPy, a description of its features, and a discussion of select submodules. The supplementary material provides additional examples and further outlines details of the architecture and features of SymPy.
},
volume = 3,
pages = {e103},
journal = {PeerJ Computer Science},
issn = {2376-5992},
url = {https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.103},
doi = {10.7717/peerj-cs.103}
}
SymPy is BSD licensed, so you are free to use it whatever you like, be
it academic, commercial, creating forks or derivatives, as long as you
copy the BSD statement if you redistribute it (see the LICENSE file for
details). That said, although not required by the SymPy license, if it
is convenient for you, please cite SymPy when using it in your work and
also consider contributing all your changes back, so that we can
incorporate it and all of us will benefit in the end.