Book Image

Mastering Python Scientific Computing

Book Image

Mastering Python Scientific Computing

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering Python Scientific Computing
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Symbols, expressions, and basic arithmetic


In SymPy, we need to define symbols before using them in any expression. Defining a symbol is very simple. We just need to use the symbol function from the Symbol class to define a symbol, as used in the following program. We can use the evalf()/n() method to get the float numerical approximation of any object.

The following program uses three ways to create symbols. For creating only one symbol the name of method is symbol and for creating multiple symbols the method name is symbols. There are two ways of creating multiple symbols: one is by passing space-separated symbol names to the symbols method, and the other is by creating a sequence of symbols such as m0, m1, m2, m3, m4 by passing m0:5 to the symbols method. In this second option, m0 is the first value of index and the number 5 after : denotes that a total of five such variables should be created.

Generally, division of two integers truncates the decimal part. To avoid this, the first line...