[hartmath] Hartmath: Introduction, thanks, help wanted?

[Preston P. <pr...@dw...>]

Hi.  I've just joined the hartmath-devel list, but I've been using HartMath
for a little while now in a GPL simulation/physics project, and I figured I'd
introduce myself, thank you for this excellent project, and offer to help.

My name is Preston Pfarner, my simulation project is extending some work
that I did with others when I was a student at Caltech.  I'm interested
in physical simulation, and that pretty much means I'm also interested in
numerical methods, graphics, symbolic math manipulation systems, etc. as
they tend to be prerequisites of various simulation algorithms.

I see that there seems to have been little activity on the project for
about a year, and I'm wondering if it's starved for developer time.  I
can offer time, fixing bugs or exploring new feature requests, but there
aren't really many open examples of either.  I filed a couple of bug
reports tonight, but they're really simple fixes.  If current developers
(which appears to mean Klaus) feel like giving me CVS commit access,
I'll close out my own bugs.  Naturally, I'd discuss proposed changes on
this list first, follow style guidelines, develop on a branch, add and run
tests, etc.  Either way.

While my focus is mainly in physical simulation, I'm pursuing an approach
that is more aware of the symbolic expressions than a typical pure
gather/scatter system.  I'm using HartMath's object representation of
expressions, and will also be using its support for symbolic differentiation.
Some aspects are much more physics than math, but it may be useful for
pure mathematical capabilities to be moved to the computer algebra
package, moving them into HartMath.

For instance, it may be useful to others to use interval analysis.  I've
built some interval capabilities like using the Interval Newton method for
robust root-finding in a multidimensional space.  Then again, adding new
components can sometimes have greater costs than benefits, so it's always
a case-by-case decision.

Thanks again for the HartMath system.

==
Preston Pfarner