SymPy: Improving the Symbolic Integrator

by Aaron Meurer for Python Software Foundation

SymPy, a computer algebra system written and executed in Python, currently has decent heuristic support for symbolic integration. However, the integrator is slow, and being a heuristic, can often fail to find an elementary integral for a function when there is one, even in simple cases. I plan to improve SymPy’s integrator by improving the heuristics as well as implementing some of the Risch algorithm, which will guarantee elementary results if they exist.