The passing of Kalevi Suominen truly a loss for the SymPy community. I had the honor of meeting Kalevi face to face once on a video call many years ago, but other than that, like everyone else, I primarily interacted with him online. Kalevi was always known in the SymPy community as the mathematics expert. As a retired professor of mathematics, his knowledge greatly assisted the development of some of the deep mathematical areas in SymPy, such as the polynomials and group theory modules. He was always available to give advice whenever I was unsure of some part of SymPy that was outside of my domain of expertise. I was always impressed by the breadth of his mathematical knowledge, as well as his skill as a Python programmer, a combination which can be rare to see.
Yet despite being easily the most mathematically adept member of the community, he never lorded it over us, but always approached every interaction with kindness and humility. He considered himself to be an equal and as both a teacher and a learner. He can be a model for the sort of contributor and community member we should all strive to be, and our project was truly lucky to have him. I found some of the papers and books he wrote on Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C32&q=Kalevi+Suominen&oq= and MathSciNet (but this requires a subscription to view, which I do not have) https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/MRAuthorID/209375. He never mentioned this work, and it seems like most of it deals with technical mathematical areas which are not directly relevant to SymPy. I'll close on the following paragraphs from Kalevi himself, which I found in an old private email from 2018, on why he contributed to SymPy: > Being retired, I consider myself lucky as I can work with open code > on my own time with no pressure. It seems that many pensioners find > themselves a hobby. This is what suits me. > > I originally came across SymPy when searching for a mathematical > library for experimenting with some algorithms. It was (almost) > "love at first sight". It does not matter that the language, Python, > is not the most efficient one. It is easy to work with, and very much > readable. Readability is important to me as it helps in finding > errors. (That is what I had been doing for a great part of my > professional life.) It was also of importance to me that functions > would look familiar, sin(x), not Sin[x]. Instead of simply using > SymPy I finally found myself wanting to improve the library, > but that is another story. Aaron Meurer On Sun, Mar 10, 2024 at 10:31 AM Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benja...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi all SymPy community, > > It is with great sadness that I bring the news that Kalevi Suominen > (@jksuom on GitHub) passed away on the 4th of March. Kalevi's son > Risto passed on this news to me and some others by email yesterday. > > I never met Kalevi in person but we had many conversations online over > many years. Kalevi was an outstanding SymPy contributor and was > involved with the project long before me and so there are others here > who have known him much longer than I have. Kalevi guided many SymPy > contributors and supervised many GSOC students over many years. > Looking in the git history his earliest commit was from almost exactly > 10 years ago. > > Personally I learnt a huge amount from Kalevi and I am very grateful > for the time he took to teach me and others and to guide the project > generally. Kalevi's expertise in many areas of Mathematics and across > the full depth of many parts of the SymPy codebase was unmatched > within the community. > > Interacting through GitHub I guess that many of us did not realise > that Kalevi's health was in decline. He continued to be involved > including most recently reviewing a pull request just 6 weeks ago. A > few weeks ago he sent me some files with what he was most recently > working on but was no longer able to finish. I will try to complete > that work and submit it as Kalevi's final pull request. > > Kalevi's passing is a huge loss to SymPy but I don't want to dwell on > that. Instead I invite those of us who have known Kalevi to share > their thoughts and memories here. > > Oscar > > -- > 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 view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAHVvXxTRWVQp_N_0%3DNnf-yBJwSu373sw-NB7UKuZCks2HTHGaA%40mail.gmail.com. -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAKgW%3D6%2Bn9hbbk2OsPqUfoJUUmrSbB1Znrx_42wgexghtYXMF6w%40mail.gmail.com.
