Comments:

- "as its beautiful logo"  should this be "as is its beautiful logo"?

- "However, the most active are..." Maybe rather say "However, the
most active as of October 2011 are..." to make it clear that this is a
snapshot into this particular point in time.  For example, over the
summer a different set of developers were most active (i.e., these
people plus the GSoC students).

- "For example, the following simple Python commands were run from the
SymPy command line." I would reword this sentence.  It sounds like
SymPy has it's own interpreter, and I think it especially would to a
user of any other computer algebra system.  I'm not sure what the best
wording is, but make it clear that SymPy just runs inside a normal
Python interpreter, such as the one that comes with Python or IPython.
Maybe it would be best to just include a short paragraph about the
isympy script, which just paraphrases the docstring from that file.

"Surprisingly, it seems Maxima cannot do this at the present time." If
I remember correctly, Maxima took the lazy route and only implemented
second order differential equations (or maybe they can also do higher
order but only if they are homogeneous, I can't remember).  The
general non-homogeneous case requires either undetermined coefficients
(if the non-homogeneous term has the correct form), or, in the general
case, the nth order version of variation of parameters, which is not
too difficult to implement if you have strong integration routines and
knowledge of linear algebra (Cramer's rule), but it seems is so rarely
actually taught that I only found two resources anywhere on the
internet that dealt with it in the nth case out of the thousands that
dealt with the 2nd order case, and neither was very good. I discussed
this on my blog back when I implemented it
(http://asmeurersympy.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/variation-of-parameters-and-more/).
In fact, at the time, I couldn't find another open source system that
implemented this, though I would definitely try to verify this fact
before putting it in the paper.

"On the
other hand, perhaps it is not surprising that SymPy is relatively strong in
the area of differential equations since many or the developers come from
physics and computational mathematics communities." Actually it's
mainly because of my GSoC project :)

Aaron Meurer

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 4:33 PM, David Joyner <wdjoy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Vladimir Perić <vlada.pe...@gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>
> ...
>
>>
>> I also think the "Capabilities" section is a bit.. short. You took it
>> from the website, I assume? That homepage hasn't been updated in a
>> long time (and writing that list is even one task for Google Code-In).
>> At the very least, I think you should give more mention to the physics
>> and quantum modules, which is a real advantage SymPy has over other
>> CAS systems.
>
>
> After a few emails from Brian Granger (thanks Brian!) I have
> created a new subsection on quanum physics. It is very sketchy
> but hopefully has enough for interested readers to pursue
> further leads.
>
> Latest version is at
> http://boxen.math.washington.edu/home/wdj/sigsam/sympy/oscas-sympy.pdf
> (and sources are in that directory too).
>
> BTW, if anyone wants to post this to github, that is fine with me.
> However, I know
> zip about git:-)
>
>
> Thanks to all of you for your great help!
>
>>
>
> ...
>
>> --
>> Vladimir Perić
>>
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