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"Doing Math with Python" by Amit Saha: Book Review | Aaron Meurer's Blog #19

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"Doing Math with Python" by Amit Saha: Book Review | Aaron Meurer's Blog

https://asmeurer.com/blog/posts/doing-math-with-python-by-amit-saha-book-review/

asmeurer commented 3 years ago

These are the original comments on this post that were made when this blog used the Disqus blog system.

Comment from amitsaha on 2015-12-23 23:13:32+00:00:

Hi Aaron,

Thank you so much for taking the time to read through the book and provide such a thorough review. I really appreciate that. You made a number of comments which would be tremendously helpful for a future edition of the book. I thought I will just briefly discuss the following three points:

It's true that Python 3.4 was released during the time frame of working on the book. However, I had already at least finished writing Chapter 3 on statistics, so..that would pretty much render a lot of the stuff in that chapter "useless", since you could just use the functions in the statistics module. However, I think having it in it's present form is still useful since I am able to demonstrate at a how to implement fairly complicated looking formulas in computer programs. I hope that's a right way of thinking about it.

I think you rightly point out the typesetting issue in the book regarding printing in SymPy. Honestly, I am not sure how hard/easy it would be to show SymPy's 2-D printing in print..but I should have paid more attention, I guess.

Regarding the usage of FiniteSet, I chose FiniteSet over the built-in sets because:
"...

However, a key reason for my choice was that I wanted to show how we can create sets which did not allow addition or removal once created - like mathematical sets. This need was fulfilled by SymPy's FiniteSet since it used Python'sfrozenset data structure and not the set data sturcture.

The alternative to that would have been to use frozenset directly, but I just did not like the idea of it and I would have also missed out on the nice features FiniteSet would provide (eventually). I should note here that once I had made the decision to go with FiniteSet, I contributed patches to SymPy to make the methods of FiniteSet more compatible with Python's built in set and also implement minor features I discussed above.

.."

I discuss it more at http://doingmathwithpython....

Once again, thank you for your review, and helping me contribute to SymPy as well while I was writing the book.

Best Wishes,
Amit.

Replies:

Comment from asmeurer on 2015-12-24 06:59:00+00:00:

The other nice thing about FiniteSet over the builtin set is that + does union on FiniteSets (this irks me to no end that this doesn't work with the builtin set).

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