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Ryacas: A computer algebra system in R
Mikkel Meyer Andersen1and Søren Højsgaard1
1Department of Mathematical Sciences, Aalborg University, Denmark
DOI: 10.21105/joss.01763
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Submitted: 29 July 2019
Published: 09 October 2019
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Summary
Ryacas is an R(R Core Team, 2018) package that enables a computer algebra system (CAS)
within Rvia the open source CAS yacas (A. Z. Pinkus & Winitzki, 2002; A. Pinkus, Winnitzky,
& Mazur, 2016), which is short for “yet another computer algebra system”.
Ryacas includes both a high-level (symbol) interface using Robjects like matrices and vectors
as well as direct access to the underlying yacas such that the user can use the full yacas
system, including for example dening new summation rules.
From a statistician’s perspective, Ryacas does provide convenient tools directly in Rlike
• sums,
• limits,
• dierentiation,
• integration,
• symbolic matrices and vectors,
• simplication, and
• outputting in TeX format,
which are helpful in both research and teaching. With Ryacas, these tools are conveniently
available from within Rthrough Ryacas. However, it must be stressed that yacas is nowhere
as powerful as the larger commercial CASs.
yacas is easy to use and extensible so that the user can dene new rules, for example for
simplication or summations. More information about yacas is available at http://www.
yacas.org/.
Ryacas contains a number of vignettes that describe both how to use the high-level interface
directly with Robjects and how to use the underlying yacas system.
Ryacas contains a version of yacas which is bundled into Ryacas using Rcpp (Eddelbuettel
& Balamuta, 2017). This means that Ryacas can be installed like any other R package with
no special installation steps being required.
References
Eddelbuettel, D., & Balamuta, J. J. (2017). Extending Rwith C++: A Brief Introduction to
Rcpp.PeerJ Preprints,5, e3188v1. doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.3188v1
Pinkus, A. Z., & Winitzki, S. (2002). YACAS: A Do-It-Yourself Symbolic Algebra Environ-
ment. In Proceedings of the joint international conferences on articial intelligence, automated
reasoning, and symbolic computation, AISC ’02/calculemus ’02 (pp. 332–336). London, UK,
UK: Springer-Verlag. doi:10.1007/3-540-45470-5_29
Andersen et al., (2019). Ryacas: A computer algebra system in R. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(42), 1763. https://doi.org/10.21105/
joss.01763
1
Pinkus, A., Winnitzky, S., & Mazur, G. (2016). Yacas - yet another computer algebra system.
Retrieved from https://yacas.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
R Core Team. (2018). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna,
Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Retrieved from https://www.R-project.org/
Andersen et al., (2019). Ryacas: A computer algebra system in R. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(42), 1763. https://doi.org/10.21105/
joss.01763
2