Diving into symbolic computing with SymPy
In this recipe, we will give a brief introduction to symbolic computing with SymPy. We will see more advanced features of SymPy in the next recipes.
Getting ready
SymPy is a pure Python package with no other dependencies, and as such, it is very easy to install. With Anaconda, you can type conda install sympy in a terminal. On Windows, you can use Chris Gohlke's package (www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#sympy). Finally, you can use the pip install sympy command.
How to do it...
SymPy can be used from a Python module, or interactively in IPython. In the notebook, all mathematical expressions are displayed with LaTeX, thanks to the MathJax JavaScript library.
Here is an introduction to SymPy:
- First, we import SymPy and enable LaTeX printing in the IPython notebook:
In [1]: from sympy import * init_printing() - To deal with symbolic variables, we first need to declare them:
In [2]: var('x y') Out[2]: (x, y) - The
var()function creates...
