On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 2:19 PM, Matthew Rocklin <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Everyone, > > I would like to create a general tensor/linear algebra framework for SymPy. > I'd like to hear ideas from the community about this. > > We already have a few linear algebraic projects within SymPy > (i.e. Matrices, SparseMatrices, MatExprs, Indexed/IndexedBase code > generation, Physics stuff, Geometric Algebra (sort of)) but they don't > communicate well. It would be nice to create a general and abstract > framework off of which these projects and others could hang and interact > more naturally. > > I'm writing the community about this for two reasons. > Reason one: I'd like feedback as to whether or not this sort of undertaking > is a good idea. If it is I'd welcome some thoughts on how it should be done > and how it could be useful for future work.
Definitely. One problem right now is that a lot of modules duplicate work, because we don't really have a good centrailzed module for things. For example, over GCI, a student merged together three independent KroneckerDelta implementations (one in sympy/physics/quantum, one in sympy/physics/secondquant, and one in sympy/functions/special/tensor_functions.py). No doubt there are other things still duplicated. That's also why even if we are implementing some of these things to help with physics, we should try to separate mathematical concepts from physical concepts in the implementation. > > Reason two: I think I can separate this work into a few pieces, each of > which would make for a good GSoC project for this year or next. Is this > endeavor something into which the community would want to invest resources? I think so. Some projects may depend on others (e.g., we're limited in what we can do with slow matrices). But feel free to do this and add the ideas to the GSoC ideas page. That page needs more ideas that have more descriptions on them (like the ones at the bottom). Not only will this help potential students, but it will help us a lot when we apply. Aaron Meurer > > Here are some projects that interest me > > Framework design - we need a sufficiently general framework (this is hard > and probably has to be half completed before GSoC time) > Abstract Vector Spaces > Tensor Math - Krastanov was talking about this and I think it's a great > idea. There is a lot of good multilinear algebra out there that SymPy > doesn't currently touch at all. > General storage - Efficient NDArray classes (dense, mutable, sparse, > functional, numpy, external programs) - views of NDArrays (transpose, > slices). > Theorem proving type system for > tensors/matrices http://scicomp.stackexchange.com/questions/74/symbolic-software-packagbasic es-for-matrix-expressions > > I've dumped some thoughts on the following wiki page > https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/Linear-Algebra-Vision > > Comments or questions are welcome. > > -Matt > > -- > 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. -- 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.
