Installation¶
The SymPy CAS can be installed on virtually any computer with Python 2.7 or above. SymPy does require mpmath Python library to be installed first. The current recommended method of installation is through Anaconda, which includes mpmath, as well as several other useful libraries. Alternatively, executables are available for Windows, and some Linux distributions have SymPy packages available.
SymPy officially supports Python 2.7, 3.3, 3.4, and PyPy.
Anaconda¶
Anaconda is a free Python distribution from Continuum Analytics that includes SymPy, Matplotlib, IPython, NumPy, and many more useful packages for scientific computing. This is recommended because many nice features of SymPy are only enabled when certain libraries are installed. For example, without Matplotlib, only simple text-based plotting is enabled. With the IPython notebook or qtconsole, you can get nicer \(\LaTeX\) printing by running init_printing() .
If you already have Anaconda and want to update SymPy to the latest version, use:
If you wish to contribute to SymPy or like to get the latest updates as they come, install SymPy from git. To download the repository, execute the following from the command line:
To update to the latest version, go into your repository and execute:
If you want to install SymPy, but still want to use the git version, you can run from your repository:
This will cause the installed version to always point to the version in the git directory.
Other Methods¶
An installation executable (.exe) is available for Windows users at the downloads site. In addition, various Linux distributions have SymPy available as a package. You may also install SymPy from source or using pip.
Run SymPy¶
After installation, it is best to verify that your freshly-installed SymPy works. To do this, start up Python and import the SymPy libraries:
From here, execute some simple SymPy statements like the ones below:
For a starter guide on using SymPy effectively, refer to the SymPy Tutorial .
Mpmath¶
Versions of SymPy prior to 1.0 included mpmath, but it now depends on it as an external dependency. If you installed SymPy with Anaconda, it will already include mpmath. Use:
to ensure that it is installed.
If you do not wish to use Anaconda, you can use pip install mpmath .
If you use mpmath via sympy.mpmath in your code, you will need to change this to use just mpmath . If you depend on code that does this that you cannot easily change, you can work around it by doing:
before the code that imports sympy.mpmath . It is recommended to change code that uses sympy.mpmath to use mpmath directly wherever possible.
Questions¶
If you have a question about installation or SymPy in general, feel free to visit our chat on Gitter. In addition, our mailing list is an excellent source of community support.
If you think there’s a bug or you would like to request a feature, please open an issue ticket.
Installation#
The SymPy CAS can be installed on virtually any computer with Python. SymPy does require mpmath Python library to be installed first. The recommended method of installation is through Anaconda, which includes mpmath, as well as several other useful libraries. Alternatively, some Linux distributions have SymPy packages available.
SymPy officially supports Python 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, and PyPy.
Anaconda#
Anaconda is a free Python distribution from Continuum Analytics that includes SymPy, Matplotlib, IPython, NumPy, and many more useful packages for scientific computing. This is recommended because many nice features of SymPy are only enabled when certain libraries are installed. For example, without Matplotlib, only simple text-based plotting is enabled. With the IPython notebook or qtconsole, you can get nicer \(\mathrm<\LaTeX>\) printing by running init_printing() .
If you already have Anaconda and want to update SymPy to the latest version, use:
If you wish to contribute to SymPy or like to get the latest updates as they come, install SymPy from git. To download the repository, execute the following from the command line:
To update to the latest version, go into your repository and execute:
If you want to install SymPy, but still want to use the git version, you can run from your repository:
This will cause the installed version to always point to the version in the git directory.
Other Methods#
You may also install SymPy using pip or from source. In addition, most Linux and Python distributions have some SymPy version available to install using their package manager. Here is a list of several such Python distributions:
Run SymPy#
After installation, it is best to verify that your freshly-installed SymPy works. To do this, start up Python and import the SymPy libraries:
From here, execute some simple SymPy statements like the ones below:
For a starter guide on using SymPy effectively, refer to the Introductory Tutorial .
mpmath#
Versions of SymPy prior to 1.0 included mpmath, but it now depends on it as an external dependency. If you installed SymPy with Anaconda, it will already include mpmath. Use:
to ensure that it is installed.
If you do not wish to use Anaconda, you can use pip install mpmath .
If you use mpmath via sympy.mpmath in your code, you will need to change this to use just mpmath . If you depend on code that does this that you cannot easily change, you can work around it by doing:
before the code that imports sympy.mpmath . It is recommended to change code that uses sympy.mpmath to use mpmath directly wherever possible.
Questions#
If you have a question about installation or SymPy in general, feel free to visit our chat on Gitter. In addition, our mailing list is an excellent source of community support.
If you think there’s a bug or you would like to request a feature, please open an issue ticket.
Installation¶
Alternatively, you can download SimPy and install it manually. Extract the archive, open a terminal window where you extracted SimPy and type:
You can now optionally run SimPy’s tests to see if everything works fine. You need pytest for this. Run the following command within the source directory of SimPy:
Upgrading from SimPy 2¶
If you are already familiar with SimPy 2, please read the Guide Porting from SimPy 2 to 3 .
What’s Next¶
Now that you’ve installed SimPy, you probably want to simulate something. The next section will introduce you to SimPy’s basic concepts.
SymPy
And many more people helped on the SymPy mailing list, reported bugs, helped organize SymPy’s participation in the Google Summer of Code, the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, Google Code-In, wrote and blogged about SymPy.
License: New BSD License (see the LICENSE file for details) covers all files in the sympy repository unless stated otherwise.
We have a community chat at Gitter. Feel free to ask us anything there. We have a very welcoming and helpful community.
Download
The recommended installation method is through Anaconda, https://www.anaconda.com/download/
You can also get the latest version of SymPy from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sympy/
To get the git version do
Documentation and Usage
For in-depth instructions on installation and building the documentation, see the SymPy Documentation Style Guide.
Everything is at:
You can generate everything at the above site in your local copy of SymPy by:
Then the docs will be in _build/html . If you don’t want to read that, here is a short usage:
From this directory, start Python and:
SymPy also comes with a console that is a simple wrapper around the classic python console (or IPython when available) that loads the SymPy namespace and executes some common commands for you.
To start it, issue:
from this directory, if SymPy is not installed or simply:
if SymPy is installed.
Installation
SymPy has a hard dependency on the mpmath library (version >= 0.19). You should install it first, please refer to the mpmath installation guide:
To install SymPy using PyPI, run the following command:
To install SymPy using Anaconda, run the following command:
To install SymPy from GitHub source, first clone SymPy using git :
Then, in the sympy repository that you cloned, simply run:
Contributing
We welcome contributions from anyone, even if you are new to open source. Please read our Introduction to Contributing page and the SymPy Documentation Style Guide. If you are new and looking for some way to contribute, a good place to start is to look at the issues tagged Easy to Fix.
Please note that all participants in this project are expected to follow our Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms. See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.
Tests
To execute all tests, run:
in the current directory.
For the more fine-grained running of tests or doctests, use bin/test or respectively bin/doctest . The master branch is automatically tested by Travis CI.
To test pull requests, use sympy-bot.
Regenerate Experimental LaTeX Parser/Lexer
The parser and lexer were generated with the ANTLR4 toolchain in sympy/parsing/latex/_antlr and checked into the repo. Presently, most users should not need to regenerate these files, but if you plan to work on this feature, you will need the antlr4 command-line tool (and you must ensure that it is in your PATH ). One way to get it is:
Alternatively, follow the instructions on the ANTLR website and download the antlr-4.10.1-complete.jar . Then export the CLASSPATH as instructed and instead of creating antlr4 as an alias, make it an executable file with the following contents:
After making changes to sympy/parsing/latex/LaTeX.g4 , run:
Clean
To clean everything (thus getting the same tree as in the repository):
You can also clean things with git using:
which will clear everything ignored by .gitignore , and:
to clear all untracked files. You can revert the most recent changes in git with:
WARNING: The above commands will all clear changes you may have made, and you will lose them forever. Be sure to check things with git status , git diff , git clean -Xn , and git clean -n before doing any of those.
Our issue tracker is at https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues. Please report any bugs that you find. Or, even better, fork the repository on GitHub and create a pull request. We welcome all changes, big or small, and we will help you make the pull request if you are new to git (just ask on our mailing list or Gitter Channel). If you further have any queries, you can find answers on Stack Overflow using the sympy tag.
Brief History
SymPy was started by Ondřej Čertík in 2005, he wrote some code during the summer, then he wrote some more code during summer 2006. In February 2007, Fabian Pedregosa joined the project and helped fix many things, contributed documentation, and made it alive again. 5 students (Mateusz Paprocki, Brian Jorgensen, Jason Gedge, Robert Schwarz, and Chris Wu) improved SymPy incredibly during summer 2007 as part of the Google Summer of Code. Pearu Peterson joined the development during the summer 2007 and he has made SymPy much more competitive by rewriting the core from scratch, which has made it from 10x to 100x faster. Jurjen N.E. Bos has contributed pretty-printing and other patches. Fredrik Johansson has written mpmath and contributed a lot of patches.
SymPy has participated in every Google Summer of Code since 2007. You can see https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki#google-summer-of-code for full details. Each year has improved SymPy by bounds. Most of SymPy’s development has come from Google Summer of Code students.
In 2011, Ondřej Čertík stepped down as lead developer, with Aaron Meurer, who also started as a Google Summer of Code student, taking his place. Ondřej Čertík is still active in the community but is too busy with work and family to play a lead development role.
Since then, a lot more people have joined the development and some people have also left. You can see the full list in doc/src/aboutus.rst, or online at:
The git history goes back to 2007 when development moved from svn to hg. To see the history before that point, look at https://github.com/sympy/sympy-old.
You can use git to see the biggest developers. The command:
will show each developer, sorted by commits to the project. The command:
will show the top developers from the last year.
Citation
To cite SymPy in publications use
Meurer A, Smith CP, Paprocki M, Čertík O, Kirpichev SB, Rocklin M, Kumar A, Ivanov S, Moore JK, Singh S, Rathnayake T, Vig S, Granger BE, Muller RP, Bonazzi F, Gupta H, Vats S, Johansson F, Pedregosa F, Curry MJ, Terrel AR, Roučka Š, Saboo A, Fernando I, Kulal S, Cimrman R, Scopatz A. (2017) SymPy: symbolic computing in Python. PeerJ Computer Science 3:e103 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.103
A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
SymPy is BSD licensed, so you are free to use it whatever you like, be it academic, commercial, creating forks or derivatives, as long as you copy the BSD statement if you redistribute it (see the LICENSE file for details). That said, although not required by the SymPy license, if it is convenient for you, please cite SymPy when using it in your work and also consider contributing all your changes back, so that we can incorporate it and all of us will benefit in the end.