In this chapter, we will give a brief introduction to using Python for symbolic computations. There is powerful software on the market for performing symbolic computations, for example, Maple™ or Mathematica™. But sometimes, it might be favorable to make symbolic calculations in the language or framework you are used to. At this stage of the book, we assume that this language is Python, so we seek a tool in Python—the module SymPy.
A complete description of SymPy, if even possible, would fill an entire book, and that is not the purpose of this chapter. Instead, we will stake out a path into this tool by examining some guiding examples, giving a flavor of the potential of this tool as a complement to NumPy and SciPy.
