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Comment by jdubb | Hacker News Reader

For those wondering, like me, what SymPy is, the top of https://docs.sympy.org/latest/index.html explains it:

> SymPy is a Python library for symbolic mathematics.

Both the release notes as well as the readme of the github repository don't explain it (or at least I couldn't find it).

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> the readme of the github repository don't explain it (or at least I couldn't find it).

The first thing in the README is this banner saying

> Python Library for Symbolic Mathematics

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sympy/sympy/master/banner....

also the "About" snippet in github has

> A computer algebra system written in pure Python

I agree, hard to find. I found this, which I think should be in the readme: https://docs.sympy.org/latest/tutorial/intro.html

Symbolic computation deals with the computation of mathematical objects symbolically. This means that the mathematical objects are represented exactly, not approximately, and mathematical expressions with unevaluated variables are left in symbolic form.

Let’s take an example...

I admit to being frustrated by the SymPy documentation. It does an adequate job of explaining "what" (i.e. the mechanics of each function or class), but I cannot read it to get an idea of the "how" or "why" questions, of how to best use SymPy to accomplish my goals.

I feel like there's a missing manual somewhere.

https://live.sympy.org/

You can play with it here! (Not this latest release though, apparently)

An oversimplified explanation. SymPy is a non-interactive toolkit for balancing the numerical coefficients of a system of nonlinear equations. FYI a "system" in this sense is a math term. I also found that SymPy is too niche because it's not interactive.

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