The 2nd week is now coming to an end, and by now I have a pretty good idea about how things often don’t work the way we want them to.

So far

I trimmed down PR 9262 to remove all the parts not yet ready. It is undergoing review and should get merged soon.

Last week, I had planned to complete work on Laurent series by now, but it is still a work in progress. Fortunately, while discussing it with my mentors, we realized that handling Puiseux series is not as difficult as I had thought initially.

Internally, all polynomials are stored in the form of a dictionary, with a tuple of exponents being the key. So x + x*y + x**2*y**3 is stored as {(1, 0): 1, (1, 1): 1, (2, 3): 1}. For Puiseux series I need to be able to have rational exponents as keys in the dict. This isn’t an issue in Python 3 as it evaluates 1/4 to 0.25 and the uses the decimal value as key. It doesn’t work in Python 2 as it evaluates 1/4 to 0 and hence all fractions less than 1 become 0. The solution to this is to use Sympy’s Rational data type, which lets us use the exact fraction as a key. This means that, hopefully, I will not need to make any complex changes in the code of ring.

I still have a few days to go in this week, during which I will further explore how to make the required changes.

There hasn’t been much progress on the hashtable as both me and Sumith have been busy with our PRs. Hopefully, we will look into it during the weekend.

Next Week

  • Make ring_series work with Puiseux series
  • Write an interface to better handle the series, especially so that it works with the rest of Sympy.

Cheers!