About the Author: To obtain his Ph.D. in physics, Ronan Lamy spent four years analyzing data in a proprietary computer algebra system. This taught him the power of symbolic computation. After quitting academia, and losing access to all his work, he discovered the beauty of Python and understood, a little late, the benefits of using a well-designed, general-purpose programming language with a free license.He is now an open-source developer and Python consultant, and remains fascinated by symbolic computation. He has been a core developer of SymPy since 2009.