On Jun 24, 11:27 am, cjkogan111 <[email protected]> wrote: > I am a statistics graduate student interested in working on sympy for > a thesis project. I thought it would be interesting to try to give the > statistics module some of the features of mathstatica (an addin for > mathematica.) The department I am part of seems concerned about: > a) Lack of a stateable thesis > b) Lack of an advisor knowledgeable in this area > c) Topic does not seem it would lead to publishing in a journal
Well, I think you can overcome the objections of your dept. (a) select a narrow, focused topic. Create a framework for general functionality but fill in only enough of it to make your particular application workable. (b) you become the resident expert. When people (e.g. your advisor) ask what you're working on, you have a an explanation ready as to why it's interesting and useful. (c) Focus on what's original. See (a). Also, it seems helpful to find some outsider (e.g. in engineering or someone in the sciences) who has a problem they need to solve. You solve it for them -- presto, your publication. About (a), my advice is to emphasize the symbolic aspects to try to drive towards an exact solution, but revert to numerical approximations when necessary. (I've peddled this idea in various forums without attracting much interest. If you want I can send you a paper which expresses some ideas I had.) An example could be exact and approximate inference in some class of generalized Markov models. (Just a random example. I 'm sure there are many others.) Hope this helps! Robert Dodier --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
