Hi everyone. This last week was the SciPy conference in Austin, TX. SymPy had quite a showing this year. Here is a summary.
# Tutorial The conference started out Monday morning with a SymPy tutorial, which was given by my and Ondrej Certik. The materials for the tutorial are at http://certik.github.io/scipy-2013-tutorial/html/index.html, and there are also links to the video. The tutorial was based on the new tutorial I have written for our official documentation, and which has been officially merged. I think the tutorial was a success. One thing that we did that people told me that they liked was that, in addition to my introductory stuff, Ondrej presented some IPython notebooks of things that he has used SymPy for in his actual research. There were several physicists in the audience, who were wowed, but even those who weren't I think got the impression that SymPy really is a tool, not just a toy. # Talks In addition to the tutorial, there were three talks about SymPy. - Matthew Rocklin gave a talk, "Matrix Expressions and BLAS/LAPACK", about his work using SymPy matrix expressions to generate code for BLAS/LAPACK. The slides are at https://github.com/scipy/scipy2013_talks/tree/master/talks/matthew_rocklin, and the video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVt24G_2VC0. - Jason Moore gave a talk about SymPy mechanics and PyDy, entitled "RigidBody Dynamics with SymPy Mechanics". The slides are at https://github.com/scipy/scipy2013_talks/tree/master/talks/jason_moore and the video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtt9hexk93o. - David Li gave a talk about his work on SymPy Live and SymPy Gamma, entitled "SymPy Gamma and SymPy Live: Python and Mathematics Online". The slides are at https://github.com/scipy/scipy2013_talks/tree/master/talks/david_li and the video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad_D4i-oYjU. - Lightning talks. None were about SymPy specifically, but I recommend you watch them. The videos are at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQdezCPT6Qg and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywHqIEv3xXg. Another good talk that I would recommend is Brian Grangers talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrpPDkZef5I. # Sprints At the sprints, we did a lot of work on getting SymPy ready for a 0.7.3 release. We are almost ready (if you want to help, take a look at https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/2233. David Li also worked with Mike McKerns at the sprints to integrate Dill (https://github.com/uqfoundation/dill) into SymPy Live, which should fix all the pickling related issues we have with it. There were a lot of people talking about SymPy at the conference. I think we made a good impact at the conference, and people are really starting to see SymPy as a powerful tool. I also met a lot of people who were using SymPy, for things that I hadn't even heard of yet (Mike McKerns is one of those people actually, for his other project Mystic). We should update our list at http://docs.sympy.org/0.7.2/outreach.html#projects-using-sympy. # Blogs Many people who attended the conference wrote blog posts about it. My post is at http://asmeurersympy.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/scipy-2013/. I gave some more details on my personal feelings of the conference there. One final note, that I thought was interesting, was Thomas Kluyver's lightning talk. Apparently scipy.org has been redesigned recently. Instead of just focusing on SciPy the library, it focuses on the core SciPy stack. They chose six key projects, which they felt were key to any stack (i.e., any stack that claims to be a scientific Python stack must contain all of these). The six packages are NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, IPython, SymPy, and Pandas (see http://www.scipy.org/). I was happy that they put SymPy in there, not just because I like SymPy, but because I think any scientific stack needs to have a symbolic component. But I thought it was interesting that they did this without (to my knowledge) anyone in the SymPy community even knowing about it. I think that really speaks to SymPy's influence and power. I hope to see even more SymPy people at the conference next year. It's likely that we will be able to fund people again, so if you are interested come next year, let me and Ondrej know. Aaron Meurer -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sympy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sympy@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
