solving the x's and y's of math, programming and life

GSoC 2016 Phase I : Proposal, Acceptance

May 2, 2016 • Gaurav Dhingra

Hello, I’m Gaurav Dhingra a 3rd year undergraduate student at IIT Roorkee, my proposal on Group Theory with SymPy has been accepted as a part of Google Summer of Code.

First, a little bit about SymPy, a Computer Algebra System (CAS) written entirely in Python. SymPy 1.0 was released about 2 months ago, Sympy has been created by hundreds of contributors starting from 2006.

I will be working on Group Theory over the summer, for the next 3 months, to implement Computational Group Theory (CGT) and Group Theory, which are parts of mathematics I particularly enjoy. You can view my project proposal GSoC 2016 Application Gaurav Dhingra: Group Theory. Until a few days ago I was pretty busy with my exams, but in the next few weeks I will go over working on the project. I will particularly focus on Finite and Finitely Presented Groups.

I hope that I’ll be able to implement everything that I promised in it. Moving onto the ongoing community bonding. Since I am very well acquitted with the workflow of SymPy, I can get straight to few important things, which i will do in the next few days.

This includes things like:

  • Setting up a blog with RSS feed i.e this blog in which I am supposed to add an RSS feed functionality.

  • Talking to my mentors regarding the time, and place of chat on internet, we differ by almost 5hrs. Time wouldn’t be an issue, since seeing from past, I haven’t faced such difficulty as both me and my mentor work for almost the same time intervals. From the GSoC 2015 discussions, I remember that Ondrej tries to make sure everyone knows what time student-mentor meet, since of different time zones.

  • In the past we have had discussion on my private gitter channel Group Theory Implementation. Would it be wise to continue code discussions there?. Since no one can be added in the channel without my permission.

One thing that has been a hell of a lot annoying has been the GSoC mailing list, it’s a lot distracting. I changed list settings to abridged daily updates because I was getting like 50 mails every day and that too about some really stupid and irrelevant things. But yeah like whatever.

“LESS TALK, MORE CODE” is the policy that I always tend to follow (not for blog!!). I will try my best to implement it in a strict way this summer. I have seen this policy working fine for me, mostly first I start writing question in a message box to my mentor, and then i think more about it myself and in the end I come up with a solution on my own, instead of asking.

I’m quite sure that I will write more than enough blog posts about my project during the summers. Since I enjoy writing and that too regarding things that occupy larger part of my day.

I’d like to thank all the people involved with contributions to SymPy. My special thanks to my mentor - Kalevi Suominen and my co-mentor - Aaron Meurer for all the suggestions while making my proposal, and showing faith and enthusiasm in my ability and my proposal.