Introduction to SymPy

SymPy (http://www.sympy.org) is a pure Python library for symbolic mathematics. It aims to become a full-featured computer algebra system (CAS) while keeping the code as simple as possible in order to be comprehensible and easily extensible. SymPy is written entirely in Python and does not require any external libraries.

We will start the presentation of SymPy by showing how to install and setup it. Then we will proceed with the basics of constructing and manipulating mathematical expressions in SymPy. We will also discuss the most common problems with SymPy and differences between it and mathematical systems, and how to deal with them. At the end we will discuss SymPy’s capabilities of printing expressions and show how to modify existing printers and implement new ones.

• Installing, configuring and running SymPy
• History of SymPy and a few statistics
• Basics of expressions in SymPy
• Gotchas and pitfalls
• Setting up and using printers