GSoC 2012 Blog Post

SymPy is a computer algebra system (CAS) written in pure Python. The core allows basic manipulation of expressions (like differentiation or expansion) and it contains many modules for common tasks (limits, integrals, differential equations, series, matrices, quantum physics, geometry, plotting, and code generation).

SymPy has participated in the Google Summer of Code program in previous years under the umbrellas of Python Software Foundation, Portland State University, and the Space Telescope Science Institute, where we were very successful. In fact, several of our core developers, including four of the mentors from this year, started working with SymPy as Google Summer of Code students. We participated in Google Summer of Code 2011 as a standalone organization for the first time. We had excellent contributions and yet more people joined the community. The 2011 report is here. We were accepted to Google Summer of Code 2012 as a standalone organization again and we would to share this year's experience in this blog post.

As part of the application process we required each student to submit a patch (as a GitHub pull request) that had to be reviewed and accepted. This allowed us to see that each applicant knew how to use git as well as communicate effectively during the review process.This also encouraged only serious applicants to apply. We had over 10 (CHECK THIS) mentors available and we ended up with 6 students, all of whom were successful at final evaluations.

We required that the students write weekly blog posts during the course of their development activity, reporting their progress and presenting their further plans. Besides helping the mentors to assess the status of their students, weekly blog reports also set weak intermediate milestones that facilitated more detailed planning. The blog posts were also required to not be overloaded with technical details, which made them suitable to use as an informal documentation of the submitted work.

In the following paragraphs we will list the GSoC-2012 students in no particular order, linking their names to their blogs and referencing their final reports, as well providing a short overview of their contribution. The applications submitted by these students can be found on SymPy wiki.

Aleksandar Makelov - Computational Group Theory, mentored by David Joyner.

Bharath M R - Implicit Plotting, mentored by Aaron Meurer.

Angadh Nanjangud - Enhancements to sympy.physics.mechanics, mentored by Gilbert Gede. (COULD NOT FIND REPORT)

Guru Devanla - Density Operators, Trace and Partial Trace for Quantum Module, mentored by Brian Granger and Sean Vig.

Sergiu Ivanov - Category Theory Module, mentored by Tom Bachmann.

Sergiu has laid the basis for a category theory module in SymPy. In the summer he mainly focused on automated plotting of commutative diagrams and producing LaTeX compatible Xy-pic output. Towards the end of the Summer of Code, Sergiu started working on automatic derivation of the property of a diagram to be commutative, basing on the knowledge that certain other diagrams are commutative. However, due to the restricted timeframe of GSoC, this effort has not yet resulted in functional code. Sergiu will continue the work on the automatic derivation of commutativity in his spare time.

Stefan Krastanov - Functional Differential Geometry, mentored by Matthew Rocklin.