Setting up an open source project

My first encounter with differential equations in high school was decidedly underwhelming. I understood that there was numerous rules on how to solve them, and that one could devote their entire life to understand these rules, and even make up new ones for particular hard equations. It all seemed a little… boring, unlike most of the other parts of mathematics. But at the same time our teacher stressed that differential equations are an extremely powerful tool for describing the world around us. Years later university and my experiences as an engineer have proven him right.

The background of Pysim

The work with Pysim actually started some time ago, in 2010 to be exact. After four years of working with control algorithms for underwater vehicles at Saab I had a new job working with nautical simulations at SSPA. At SSPA there are very sophisticated models of ships. The models are based on solid physics combined with the long experience SSPA has in model testing. The models are expressed as differential equations (you guessed it). The problem were that the legacy software used to solve these equations was quite dated and no longer maintained. So Pysim was born to replace it. The development have been ongoing ever since, driven by the need of the simulations at SSPA. But at the same time Pysim is a quite general tool, and could be used by others as well. So before my parental leave in 2016 I proposed to management that we should take Pysim open source. This would hopefully benefit the open source society as a whole, and maybe also SSPA if there are external contributions to the project. Management agreed to my proposal, which I am forever grateful. So here I am, launching Pysim, a tool for simulation of dynamical systems as open source. I hope you will find it useful!