End of July Update

Yet again, not much to update on. We're just beating away at the newly merged trunk and trying to fix up some issues before the 0.5 release. After that it'll just be more issue fixing. Considering this summer I've been taking a course on ordinary differential equations I may consider working on the facilities in SymPy that solve ODEs. Only one more month left to the summer but a lot has gotten done. I'm looking forward to it though, to see what state SymPy is in.

I'm also looking forward to school starting again. Ignoring work, this summer has been far from what I hoped it would be, but I'm probably partly to blame for that one. As for school, I'll be taking these courses:

• Integration and Metric Spaces
• Abstract Algebra
• Combinatorial Analysis
• Computer Graphics
• Computational Complexity

I'm not looking forward to the first one, but the rest of them should be alright. Although it might be a bit of work, I expect Computer Graphics to be somewhat enjoyable, or as enjoyable as a school-related item can be! This year will be my last year of regular courses. I'm hoping to have another research award next Summer and then the Fall following it will be my honors thesis, and I have no idea what to do for that at the moment. So at the end of '08 I'll officially have my undergraduate degree from MUN: a joint major in Computer Science and Pure Mathematics.

GSoC Update

It's been quite some time since I've had an update, so I felt like it is only due time to write a little something. There's been a lot of "off to the side" work. Preparations are currently under way to merge the research branch of SymPy with the actual trunk. This is a fair amount of work, and hence we're trying to coordinate everything so that things run smoothly. I have rewritten unit tests to be supported by py.test, but there is also the moving/updating of tests from the trunk and ensuring modules still work along with their tests. This whole merge will be my major task for the next little while.

I will be heading to WADS 2007, the Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures, during mid August. It is a conference that [sort of] deals with my current research area so I was advised to go. I'm doing so for not only that reason, but also because I would like to see if the academia lifestyle is the one for me. The conference looks to have some interesting papers, and I bet there will be some interesting people to meet.

Approximations

My latest work involves upgrading the approximations implemented in a lot of the evalf() methods, along with adding some new approximations. Problems with precision caused the older evalf() methods to evaluate incorrectly. Although the error was little, to someone actually asking for high precision results would probably consider it quite significant. There was a lot of work to be done, but I have most of it working now, albeit some of the new series approximations I have implemented converge slowly in large domains, they are at least there as a foundation. When working on this I came across a lot of small bugs that were floating around and fixed them also.

After finishing this I was able to use arc cosine approximations to ensure that Polygon.angles was returning correct results (or at least for the test cases I wrote it works!). After I get a few more test cases written I'll be committing my latest Geometry module work and then consider working on some more core stuff.