Now on Sourceforge

This is a little idea I have been working on for a number of years. It is inspired by the excellent closed source MathCad application.

The goal is to create a mathematical application that is useful for scientists and engineers.

The application has been written using Python, along with the SciPy, PyQt, SymPy, PyQwt, PyQwt3D and Ply extension packages. Currently speed is not an issue since all number crunching is handled by optimized Fortran and C routines wrapped by SciPy. The symbolic extension Sympy is currently written in pure Python, however future versions will make use of Cython for a significant speed improvement.

Most of the proof of concept stuff has been done now. The equation rendering algorithm is nailed down and works well. Parsing of the internal representation of the equations is handled by the Ply parser. The Ply parser is also used to convert the text based output of the results generated by Sympy into pretty graphics on the screen. Basic 2D and interactive 3D plotting works now.

Future work will include code clean up, adding more plots types and features, context menus, various dialogs, possibly re-writing the rendering algorithm in C/C++/Cython, adding more convenient methods for creating matrices and array, e.g. m[3,5]=5.5 will create a 3x5 matrix if m has not already been defined.