Matthew, Welcome!
> I'm a PhD student studying Computer Science at the University of > Chicago with a background in Physics and Mathematics. I'm a heavy user > of Python and its open source developments but have never contributed > more than bug reports. I code a fair amount but it's all research- > grade and not suitable for public use. My goal for this project would > be to focus on crafting code and a clear end-user experience rather > than focusing on a scientific research question. I would also like to > engage and join the Python community a bit; I've always been "just an > end-user." Sounds great. You have a solid background and should be able to come up with a good proposal. > I'm searching for an appropriate project for a summer. I'm looking > over the provided list and at the existing functionality in SymPy. I > have a few ideas but I'd appreciate suggestions. > > My interests include the following: Scientific Computing (generally), > Numerical Linear Algebra, Physics (generally), Geometry/Relativity, > Dynamical Systems, Statistics (generally), Uncertainty/Sensitivity, > Optimization, Education. I am mostly involved in the quantum/physics side of things. I can let you know what is going on in that area and others can fill in the other stuff. > Thoughts: > My ideal project would be to develop a code-base for General > Relativity. However I see that someone else already has some code that > they're thinking of contributing. Would it be best to wait on this? Possibly, but not necessarily. There is probably a ton to do and you may want to ping the person working on that. > Are there supporting aspects of this topic that I could help with > (reworking tensors for example). Relevant thread here: http://goo.gl/zRmDs > I could probably improve sympy Matrices. I'm curious, how many people > use the existing functionality? What are common applications for > symbolic matrices? If I go this route I want to make sure that there > are some good motivating use cases. I wonder if something akin to > numpy's ndarray would be appropriate to merge both this and the above > topic. A lot of functionality is shared and currently (I think) > codeveloped in both branches. One thing that is definitely needed is to make Matrix a regular sympy object (that inherits from Basic). The main issue is that currently all sympy objects are immutable, but Matrices are not. We probably need to create new classes MutableBasic and ImmutableBasic and derive Matrix from MutableBasic. BUT, this will require a ton of work on the core because throughout the entire code base, it is assumed that objects are immutable. > Brian Granger's quantum physics projects seem appropriate. Yes, have you checked out the sympy GSoC ideas for 2011: https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/GSoC-2011-Ideas The Physics topics there are mostly up to date. Let me know if there are particular physics topics you are interested in and we an discuss the details. > I'm also tangentially interested in code generation. Any suggestions > on this front? > Anyone have thoughts for applications in education? Something like > sympy might aid significantly in learning calculus for example. One of the main motivations of the quantum stuff is for education. One very interesting project would be to go through and implement all the textbook quantum systems in sympy.physics.quantum. This would related to the work on the position and momentum bases. Cheers, Brian > Can anyone think of projects that would be appropriate for someone of > my background that haven't yet been added to the ideas list? > > Thanks all for your time and input, > -Matt > http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~mrocklin > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sympy" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en. > > -- Brian E. Granger, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Physics Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo [email protected] [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en.
