Hi Richard, On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 5:32 PM, Richard Fateman <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > I think your arguments are weak, though given the audience, perhaps they > would be appealing. > > Here's what I think constitute good arguments for people to know about CAS. > Maybe even sympy. > > 1. Scientists, mathematicians and programmers all have a rich language and > context for > discussing the solution of difficult problems. Users of traditional > numerical computation > much couch their solutions in terms of objects that are floating-point > numbers or collections of > them such as matrices > > 2. Symbolic computation allows for a much broader class of objects, and > supports > the manipulation of formulas, algebraic equations, > differential equations, series, geometric descriptions, and more. > > As a simple example, solution of the quadratic equation in s, > s^2+(a/n)*(n^2-1)*s -a^2=0 > can be easily expressed, and trivially solved in a CAS to find the solutions > s=-a*n and s=a/n. > The presence of extra parameters (a,n) in the problem and the solution would > pose difficulties > for a numeric solution. > > 3. Many algorithms of applied mathematics, usually portrayed in references > and texts as appropriate > for "hand calculation" can in fact be encoded in symbolic form, using > formulas as input and output. > Famously, these include symbolic integration, differentiation, expansion in > series, summation. > > 4. Routines may be written which, through symbolic manipulation, produce > specialized versions > of algorithms tailored to tasks which themselves be numeric, but whose > programming "by hand" > would be too laborious and error-prone to seriously consider. As examples, > super-accurate > programs for scientific subroutine libraries have been developed. > > 5. CAS can be used to symbolically execute and prove the correctness of > algorithms that > might otherwise be challenges to understand. > > 6. And more...
Thanks for the points. I agree with them. Aaron, I think lots of talks were rejected from this year's SciPy conference. Are you going to prepare a poster? Ondrej -- 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. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CADDwiVBGTnrK_Dqr2NXH3B-QRWFwO69Tezu4UZaUwTKV4m%2Bvrw%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
