EinsteinPy - Making Einstein possible in Python

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EinsteinPy is an open-source pure Python package dedicated to the study of problems arising in General Relativity and gravitational physics. Using EinsteinPy, it is possible to approach problems symbolically as well as numerically.

On the symbolic side, EinsteinPy provides a robust API, which allows users to access several predefined metrics or to define custom metrics and perform symbolic calculations on them. Computation of quantities, such as terms of metric tensors, Christoffel symbols, Riemann Curvature tensor, Ricci tensor, stress-energy tensor and more are all supported and extensible, since the symbolic modules are built on top of SymPy.

On the numerical side, EinsteinPy provides tools to calculate and visualize geodesics, metric singularities and hypersurface embeddings in certain spacetimes. We hope to extend the package to include more features in the future.

EinsteinPy works on recent versions of Python and is released under the MIT license, hence allowing commercial use of the library.

Motivation

Most of the general relativity packages currently available in the gravitational physics research community demand knowledge of paid-for software / computer algebra systems or programming experience in languages like C/C++. Many of the people working in the field of gravitational physics come from a theoretical background and have little programming experience. As such, they find using these libraries difficult. EinsteinPy is motivated by these problems and aims to provide a high level of abstraction, that enables anyone to do general relativity calculations without being bogged down by the implementation details or obscure errors. Since the library is written in Python, it is easy to use and understand, which also makes it a perfect fit for teaching purposes.

Moreover, EinsteinPy being FOSS also helps interested users understand the code and modify it to suit their needs, which in turn grows the project and positively adds to the research community.


EinsteinPy is developed by an open community. Hence, all contributions are more than welcome! Visit our GitHub to view EinsteinPy’s source code and to report errors or suggest improvements. For information on contributing code to the project, head to the developer guide.

element Join the chat at https://gitter.im/EinsteinPy-Project/EinsteinPy

Please join our Element channel or Gitter chat room for general discussions and further queries. Release announcements take place on our mailing list.

If you still have a doubt, write to us directly at all@einsteinpy.org.

Please use the links below or on the navigation bar to explore some examples or the API documentation. If you want to view the documentation for a specific version, please use the pop-up menu on the bottom-right corner of the page.


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