Setting up mpmath

Download and installation

Installer

The mpmath setup files can be downloaded from the mpmath download page or the Python Package Index. Download the source package (available as both .zip and .tar.gz), extract it, open the extracted directory, and run

python setup.py install

If you are using Windows, you can download the binary installer

mpmath-(version).win32.exe

from the mpmath website or the Python Package Index. Run the installer and follow the instructions.

Using setuptools

If you have setuptools installed, you can download and install mpmath in one step by running:

easy_install mpmath

or

python -m easy_install mpmath

If you have an old version of mpmath installed already, you may have to pass easy_install the -U flag to force an upgrade.

Debian/Ubuntu

Debian and Ubuntu users can install mpmath with

sudo apt-get install python-mpmath

See debian and ubuntu package information; please verify that you are getting the latest version.

OpenSUSE

Mpmath is provided in the “Science” repository for all recent versions of openSUSE. To add this repository to the YAST software management tool, see http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Add_package_repositories

Look up http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/science/ for a list of supported OpenSUSE versions and use http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/science/openSUSE_11.1/ (or accordingly for your OpenSUSE version) as the repository URL for YAST.

Current development version

See http://code.google.com/p/mpmath/source/checkout for instructions on how to check out the mpmath Subversion repository. The source code can also be browsed online from the Google Code page.

Checking that it works

After the setup has completed, you should be able to fire up the interactive Python interpreter and do the following:

>>> from mpmath import *
>>> mp.dps = 50
>>> print mpf(2) ** mpf('0.5')
1.4142135623730950488016887242096980785696718753769
>>> print 2*pi
6.2831853071795864769252867665590057683943387987502

Note: if you have are upgrading mpmath from an earlier version, you may have to manually uninstall the old version or remove the old files.

Using gmpy (optional)

By default, mpmath uses Python integers internally. If gmpy version 1.03 or later is installed on your system, mpmath will automatically detect it and transparently use gmpy integers intead. This makes mpmath much faster, especially at high precision (approximately above 100 digits).

To verify that mpmath uses gmpy, check the internal variable BACKEND is not equal to ‘python’:

>>> import mpmath.libmp
>>> mpmath.libmp.BACKEND 
'gmpy'

The gmpy mode can be disabled by setting the MPMATH_NOGMPY environment variable. Note that the mode cannot be switched during runtime; mpmath must be re-imported for this change to take effect.

Running tests

It is recommended that you run mpmath’s full set of unit tests to make sure everything works. The tests are located in the tests subdirectory of the main mpmath directory. They can be run in the interactive interpreter using the runtests() function:

import mpmath
mpmath.runtests()

Alternatively, they can be run from the tests directory via

python runtests.py

The tests should finish in about a minute. If you have psyco installed, the tests can also be run with

python runtests.py -psyco

which will cut the running time in half.

If any test fails, please send a detailed bug report to the mpmath issue tracker. The tests can also be run with py.test. This will sometimes generate more useful information in case of a failure.

To run the tests with support for gmpy disabled, use

python runtests.py -nogmpy

To enable extra diagnostics, use

python runtests.py -strict

Compiling the documentation

If you downloaded the source package, the text source for these documentation pages is included in the doc directory. The documentation can be compiled to pretty HTML using Sphinx. Go to the doc directory and run

python build.py

You can also test that all the interactive examples in the documentation work by running

python run_doctest.py

and by running the individual .py files in the mpmath source.

(The doctests may take several minutes.)

Finally, some additional demo scripts are available in the demo directory included in the source package.

Mpmath under SymPy

Mpmath is available as a subpackage of SymPy. With SymPy installed, you can just do

import sympy.mpmath as mpmath

instead of import mpmath. Note that the SymPy version of mpmath might not be the most recent. You can make a separate mpmath installation even if SymPy is installed; the two mpmath packages will not interfere with each other.

Mpmath under Sage

Mpmath is a standard package in Sage, in version 4.1 or later of Sage. Mpmath is preinstalled a regular Python module, and can be imported as usual within Sage:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Sage Version 4.1, Release Date: 2009-07-09                         |
| Type notebook() for the GUI, and license() for information.        |
----------------------------------------------------------------------
sage: import mpmath
sage: mpmath.mp.dps = 50
sage: print mpmath.mpf(2) ** 0.5
1.4142135623730950488016887242096980785696718753769

The mpmath installation under Sage automatically use Sage integers for asymptotically fast arithmetic, so there is no need to install GMPY:

sage: mpmath.libmp.BACKEND
'sage'

In Sage, mpmath can alternatively be imported via the interface library sage.libs.mpmath.all. For example:

sage: import sage.libs.mpmath.all as mpmath

This module provides a few extra conversion functions, including call() which permits calling any mpmath function with Sage numbers as input, and getting Sage RealNumber or ComplexNumber instances with the appropriate precision back:

sage: w = mpmath.call(mpmath.erf, 2+3*I, prec=100)
sage: w
-20.829461427614568389103088452 + 8.6873182714701631444280787545*I
sage: type(w)
<type 'sage.rings.complex_number.ComplexNumber'>
sage: w.prec()
100

See the help for sage.libs.mpmath.all for further information.