The poorman's solution that I used when I had this problem was to do
the calculations in a different basis. I do not know how
general/automatic this solution would be.

However, a common reason for bad/no simplification is lack of
appropriate assumptions. Define all you symbols as real/positive and
half of the issues will go away.

On 10 September 2013 12:17, Jason Moore <[email protected]> wrote:
> In the mechanics package we sometimes end up with symbolic expressions that
> can give a divide by zero error if we use the expression in a numerical
> function. Below is a simple example of an expression that could be generated
> by the mechanics package. It should evaluate to zero (i.e the limit as vx ->
> zero. evalf says it's zero but if I use lambdify (or probably any code
> generator) to transform the expression to something that is purely numeric
> we get divide by zeros. I feel like this must be a common issue when
> transforming symbolic expressions to numerical functions. Does anyone know
> how or if this is dealt with? It be nice if we could generate equations of
> motion in the mechanics package and generate code from them that wouldn't
> have divide by zero errors, requiring some fix on the numerical side.
>
> In [1]: from sympy import symbols, sqrt, lambdify
>
> In [2]: k, vx, vy, vz = symbols('k vx vy vz')
>
> In [3]: f = k * sqrt(vx ** 2 + vy ** 2 + vz ** 2)
>
> In [4]: dfdvx = f.diff(vx)
>
> In [5]: dfdvx
> Out[5]: k*vx/sqrt(vx**2 + vy**2 + vz**2)
>
> In [6]: dfdvx.evalf(subs={k: 1.0, vx: 0.0, vy: 0.0, vz: 0.0})
> Out[6]: 0
>
> In [7]: numeric_dfdvx = lambdify((k, vx, vy, vz), dfdvx)
>
> In [8]: numeric_dfdvx(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0)
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ZeroDivisionError                         Traceback (most recent call last)
> <ipython-input-8-55e44f8ab1bf> in <module>()
> ----> 1 numeric_dfdvx(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0)
>
> /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/numpy/__init__.pyc in
> <lambda>(_Dummy_26, _Dummy_27, _Dummy_28, _Dummy_29)
>
> ZeroDivisionError: float division by zero
>
> In [9]: numeric_dfdvx = lambdify((k, vx, vy, vz), dfdvx, modules='numpy')
>
> In [10]: numeric_dfdvx(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0)
> /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/numpy/__init__.py:1: RuntimeWarning:
> invalid value encountered in double_scalars
>   """
> Out[10]: nan
>
> In [11]: numeric_dfdvx = lambdify((k, vx, vy, vz), dfdvx, modules='mpmath')
>
> In [12]: numeric_dfdvx(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0)
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ZeroDivisionError                         Traceback (most recent call last)
> <ipython-input-12-55e44f8ab1bf> in <module>()
> ----> 1 numeric_dfdvx(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0)
>
> <string> in <lambda>(k, vx, vy, vz)
>
> /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/sympy/mpmath/ctx_mp_python.pyc in
> __rdiv__(s, t)
>     206         if t is NotImplemented:
>     207             return t
> --> 208         return t / s
>     209
>     210     def __rpow__(s, t):
>
> /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/sympy/mpmath/ctx_mp_python.pyc in
> __div__(self, other)
>
> /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/sympy/mpmath/libmp/libmpf.pyc in
> mpf_div(s, t, prec, rnd)
>     928     if not sman or not tman:
>     929         if s == fzero:
> --> 930             if t == fzero: raise ZeroDivisionError
>     931             if t == fnan: return fnan
>     932             return fzero
>
> ZeroDivisionError:
>
> In [19]: dfdvx.limit(vx, 0.0)
> Out[19]: 0
>
>
> Jason
> moorepants.info
> +01 530-601-9791
>
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