Background

[mrocklin]

As far as I can tell there is no background section yet. I believe that this is important to have. I think that SymPy exists within the broader context of CASs, compilers, and the scientific python ecosystem, all of which have valuable histories for this sort of paper.

[certik]

I think we should have it there. @asmeurer, @scopatz, @moorepants ?

[mrocklin]

I'm happy to write something up. I think that we should agree on scope and ideally everyone contributes projects/citations that they believe should be in there.

Here is some content copied from another document of mine:

History of Computer Algebra

The first computer algebra system (CAS), Macsyma[29],
was developed in 1962. The field grew slowly both in academic scope and in software.
Commercial and open computer algebra systems like Maple and GAP began appearing in
the 1980s. These were primarily used in pure mathematics research. Some systems were
specialized to particular fields while others were general. For example GAP was specialized
to algebraic group theory while Maple remained generally applicable. The community around
a project often defined its function more than the language design.

The popular solution Mathematica was initially released in 1988 and grew, alongside Maple,
to include numeric solvers, creating an “all in one” development environment.

We should probably include Sage and others though.

[certik]

@mrocklin we have done extensive research about this in [1]. Here is the relevant part:

History
Algorithms for Computer Algebra [2] provides a con- cise description about the history of symbolic compu- tation. The invention of LISP in the early 1960s had a great impact on the development of symbolic computa- tion. FORTRAN and ALGOL which existed at the time were primarily designed for numerical computation. In 1961, James Slagle atMIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) wrote a heuristics-based LISP program for Symbolic Automatic INTegration (SAINT)[3]. In 1963, Martinus J. G. Veltman developed Schoonschip [4, 5] for particle physics calculations. In 1966, Joel Moses (also from MIT) wrote a program called SIN [6] for the same purpose as SAINT, but he used a more efficient algorithmic approach. In 1968, REDUCE [7] was developed by Tony Hearn at Stanford University for physics calculations. Also in 1968, a specialized CAS called CAMAL [8] for handling Poisson series in celestial mechanics was developed by John Fitch and David Barton from the University of Cambridge. In 1970, a general purposed system called REDUCE 2 was introduced.

In 1971 Macsyma [9] was developed with capabilities for algebraic manipulation, limit calculations, symbolic integration, and the solution of equations. In the late 1970s muMATH [10] was developed by the University of Hawaii and it came with its own programming language. It was the first CAS to run on widely available IBM PC computers. With the development of computing in 1980s, more modern CASes began to emerge. Maple [11] was introduced by the University of Waterloo with a small compiled kernel and a large mathematical library, thus allowing it to be used powerfully on smaller platforms. In 1988, Mathematica [12] was developed by StephenWolfram with better graphical capabilities and integration with graphical user interfaces. In the 1980s more and more CASes were developed likeMacaulay [13], PARI [14], GAP [15], and CAYLEY [16] (which later became Magma [17]). With the popularization of open-source software in the past decade, many open-source CASes were developed like Sage [18], SymPy [19], etc. Also, many of the existing CASes were later open sourced; for for example, Macsyma became Maxima [20]; Scratch- pad [21] became Axiom [22].

I'll forward the full article to your email address.

[1] Čertík, O., Paprocki, M., Meurer, A., Granger, B., & Rathnayake, T. (2015). Symbolic Computing. In Encyclopedia of Applied and Computational Mathematics (pp. 1431–1439). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70529-1_429

[hargup]

http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70529-1_429

The DOI link is broken.

[certik]

@hargup I know, I reported it, but nobody got back to me. Here is the link: http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-540-70529-1_429, you can see there that the DOI is 10.1007/978-3-540-70529-1_429.

[asmeurer]

Sure if you want to write something go for it.

[hargup]

Sure if you want to write something go for it.

I'll surely do it, I might as well do a paper on it next semester. I feel
SciHub is necessary civil disobedience for the universal access to
scientific knowledge.

On 19 May 2016 at 01:16, Aaron Meurer [email protected] wrote:

Sure if you want to write something go for it.

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