SymPy VS SciPy

Compare SymPy vs SciPy and see what are their differences.

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SymPy SciPy
34 50
12,365 12,431
3.8% 1.7%
10.0 9.9
7 days ago 3 days ago
Python Python
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

SymPy

Posts with mentions or reviews of SymPy. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-09.
  • AutoCodeRover resolves 22% of real-world GitHub in SWE-bench lite
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Apr 2024
    Thank you for your interest. There are some interesting examples in the SWE-bench-lite benchmark which are resolved by AutoCodeRover:

    - From sympy: https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues/13643. AutoCodeRover's patch for it: https://github.com/nus-apr/auto-code-rover/blob/main/results...

    - Another one from scikit-learn: https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/issues/13070. AutoCodeRover's patch (https://github.com/nus-apr/auto-code-rover/blob/main/results...) modified a few lines below (compared to the developer patch) and wrote a different comment.

    There are more examples in the results directory (https://github.com/nus-apr/auto-code-rover/tree/main/results).

  • SymPy: Symbolic Mathematics in Python
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Feb 2024
    That's interesting. You should consider yourself lucky to have met Wolfram employees, as they are obviously vastly outnumbered by users of Mathematica.

    I have not met any developers for either of these products but I know that SymPy has a huge list of contributors for a project of its size. See: https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/master/AUTHORS

    You may not be hearing about SymPy users because SymPy is not a monolithic product. It is a library. If you know mathematicians big into using Python, they are probably aware of SymPy as it is the main attraction when it comes to symbolic computation in Python.

  • Matrix Cookbook examples using SymPy
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2024
  • Fast Symbolic Computation for Robotics
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Nov 2023
    https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues/9479 suggests that multivariate inequalities are still unsolved in SymPy, though it looks like https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/21687 was merged in August. This probably isn't yet implemented in C++ in SymForce yet?
  • Solving a simple puzzle using SymPy
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Aug 2023
    bug report opened https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues/25507
  • Stem Formulas
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jul 2023
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36463580

    From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159017 :

    > sympy.utilities.lambdify.lambdify() https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/a76b02fcd3a8b7f79b3a88df... :

    >> """Convert a SymPy expression into a function that allows for fast numeric evaluation [with the CPython math module, mpmath, NumPy, SciPy, CuPy, JAX, TensorFlow, SymPy, numexpr,]*

    From https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-19084622 :

    > "latex2sympy parses LaTeX math expressions and converts it into the equivalent SymPy form" and is now merged into SymPy master and callable with sympy.parsing.latex.parse_latex(). It requires antlr-python-runtime to be installed. https://github.com/augustt198/latex2sympy https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/13706

    ENH: 'generate a Jupyter notebook' (nbformat .ipynb JSON) function from this stem formula

  • Vectorization: Introduction
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jun 2023
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectorization :

    > Array programming, a style of computer programming where operations are applied to whole arrays instead of individual elements

    > Automatic vectorization, a compiler optimization that transforms loops to vector operations

    > Image tracing, the creation of vector from raster graphics

    > Word embedding, mapping words to vectors, in natural language processing

    > Vectorization (mathematics), a linear transformation which converts a matrix into a column vector

    Vector (disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector

    > Vector (mathematics and physics):

    > Row and column vectors, single row or column matrices

    > Vector space

    > Vector field, a vector for each point

    And then there are a number of CS usages of the word vector for 1D arrays.

    Compute kernel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute_kernel

    GPGPU > Vectorization, Stream Processing > Compute kernels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g...

    sympy.utilities.lambdify.lambdify() https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/a76b02fcd3a8b7f79b3a88df... :

    > """Convert a SymPy expression into a function that allows for fast numeric evaluation [with the CPython math module, mpmath, NumPy, SciPy, CuPy, JAX, TensorFlow, SymPt, numexpr,]

    pyorch lambdify PR, sympytorch: https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/20516#issuecomment-78428...

    Sympytorch:

    > Turn SymPy expressions into PyTorch Modules.

    > SymPy floats (optionally) become trainable parameters. SymPy symbols are inputs to the Module.

    sympy2jax https://github.com/MilesCranmer/sympy2jax :

    > Turn SymPy expressions into parametrized, differentiable, vectorizable, JAX functions.

    > All SymPy floats become trainable input parameters. SymPy symbols become columns of a passed matrix.

  • Has anyone solved the prime number problem on SPOJ yet using pure python?
    2 projects | /r/Python | 29 May 2023
    Look at sympy.isprime for a carefully-optimized pure-Python solution (though if gmpy2 is installed, which it usually is, it will use that instead after trying the easiest cases)
  • What can I contribute to SciPy (or other) with my pure math skill? I’m pen and paper mathematician
    5 projects | /r/Python | 17 Apr 2023
  • Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Oct 2022

SciPy

Posts with mentions or reviews of SciPy. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-04.
  • What Is a Schur Decomposition?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Mar 2024
    I guess it is a rite of passage to rewrite it. I'm doing it for SciPy too together with Propack in [1]. Somebody already mentioned your repo. Thank you for your efforts.

    [1]: https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/18566

  • Fortran codes are causing problems
    2 projects | /r/rstats | 13 Sep 2023
    Fortran codes have caused many problems for the Python package Scipy, and some of them are now being rewritten in C: e.g., https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/19121. Not only does R have many Fortran codes, there are also many R packages using Fortran codes: https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn, https://github.com/cran?q=&type=&language=fortran&sort=. Modern Fortran is a fine language but most legacy Fortran codes use the F77 style. When I update the R package quantreg, which uses many Fortran codes, I get a lot of warning messages. Not sure how the Fortran codes in the R ecosystem will be dealt with in the future, but they recently caused an issue in R due to the lack of compiler support for Fortran: https://blog.r-project.org/2023/08/23/will-r-work-on-64-bit-arm-windows/index.html. Some renowned packages like glmnet already have their Fortran codes rewritten in C/C++: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/glmnet/news/news.html
  • [D] Which BLAS library to choose for apple silicon?
    2 projects | /r/MachineLearning | 24 May 2023
    There are several lessons here: a) vanilla conda-forge numpy and scipy versions come with openblas, and it works pretty well, b) do not use netlib unless your matrices are small and you need to do a lot of SVDs, or idek why c) Apple's veclib/accelerate is super fast, but it is also numerically unstable. So much so that the scipy's devs dropped any support of it back in 2018. Like dang. That said, they are apparently are bring it back in, since the 13.3 release of macOS Ventura saw some major improvements in accelerate performance.
  • SciPy: Interested in adopting PRIMA, but little appetite for more Fortran code
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 May 2023
    First, if you read through that scipy issue (https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/18118 ) the author was willing and able to relicense PRIMA under a 3-clause BSD license which is perfectly acceptable for scipy.

    For the numerical recipes reference, there is a mention that scipy uses a slightly improved version of Powell's algorithm that is originally due to Forman Acton and presumably published in his popular book on numerical analysis, and that also happens to be described & included in numerical recipes. That is, unless the code scipy uses is copied from numerical recipes, which I presume it isn't, NR having the same algorithm doesn't mean that every other independent implementation of that algorithm falls under NR copyright.

  • numerically evaluating wavelets?
    1 project | /r/math | 3 May 2023
  • Fortran in SciPy: Get rid of linalg.interpolative Fortran code
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Apr 2023
  • Optimization Without Using Derivatives
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Apr 2023
    Reading the discussions under a previous thread titled "More Descent, Less Gradient"( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23004026 ), I guess people might be interested in PRIMA ( www.libprima.net ), which provides the reference implementation for Powell's renowned gradient/derivative-free (zeroth-order) optimization methods, namely COBYLA, UOBYQA, NEWUOA, BOBYQA, and LINCOA.

    PRIMA solves general nonlinear optimizaton problems without using derivatives. It implements Powell's solvers in modern Fortran, compling with the Fortran 2008 standard. The implementation is faithful, in the sense of being mathmatically equivalent to Powell's Fortran 77 implementation, but with a better numerical performance. In contrast to the 7939 lines of Fortran 77 code with 244 GOTOs, the new implementation is structured and modularized.

    There is a discussion to include the PRIMA solvers into SciPy ( https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/18118 ), replacing the buggy and unmaintained Fortran 77 version of COBYLA, and making the other four solvers available to all SciPy users.

  • What can I contribute to SciPy (or other) with my pure math skill? I’m pen and paper mathematician
    5 projects | /r/Python | 17 Apr 2023
  • Emerging Technologies: Rust in HPC
    3 projects | /r/rust | 24 Mar 2023
    if that makes your eyes bleed, what do you think about this? https://github.com/scipy/scipy/blob/main/scipy/special/specfun/specfun.f (heh)
  • Python
    3 projects | /r/ProgrammerHumor | 29 Dec 2022

What are some alternatives?

When comparing SymPy and SciPy you can also consider the following projects:

NumPy - The fundamental package for scientific computing with Python.

statsmodels - Statsmodels: statistical modeling and econometrics in Python

Pandas - Flexible and powerful data analysis / manipulation library for Python, providing labeled data structures similar to R data.frame objects, statistical functions, and much more

Numba - NumPy aware dynamic Python compiler using LLVM

NetworkX - Network Analysis in Python

astropy - Astronomy and astrophysics core library

ti84-forth - A Forth implementation for the TI-84+ calculator.

or-tools - Google's Operations Research tools:

Ndless - The TI-Nspire calculator extension for native applications

PyMC - Bayesian Modeling and Probabilistic Programming in Python