Hello All, This is very sad to hear for me. Being someone who worked with him for like 6 - 8 months (Oct 2021 - Apr 2022 while I used to contribute to the Series & Limits module and May 2022 - Aug 2022 while Kalevi was my GSoC Mentor) , I can say that this is a huge loss for the community. If you see my PRs from Oct 2021 to Apr 2022, almost all have been merged by Kalevi cause we were trying to solve some fundamental issues in the series module and the code for that was written back in 2008 - 2010, so it needed some special attention and refactoring. I always felt that his reviews on my PR were so spot on.
This also led to my GSoC project where we tried addressing more relevant issues. I was in touch with him over chat for about 3 months on a daily basis, though sadly I never met him over video. I remember we used to brainstorm on approaches to solve an issue and as usual he had and approach and I had a counter approach which I felt would work out too. So I used to challenge him and he always gave me the freedom to try (and I think he knew I would fail) and then get back to his approach. Specially on this PR ( https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/23592) . This happened a couple of times after which I knew that whatever he says is backed by his experience as a SymPy developer and I shouldn't be challenging him. Hence being someone who got a chance to work with him closely, I can say this is huge loss for the sympy community. I know a couple PRs where Kalevi had an approach in mind and had mentioned it but nobody tried addressing it, for eg https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/25756#issuecomment-1864176011 . I shall try looking into this whenever I have time. Regards, Anutosh Bhat On Sunday, March 10, 2024 at 10:01:43 PM UTC+5:30 Oscar wrote: > Hi all SymPy community, > > It is with great sadness that I bring the news that Kalevi Suominen > (@jksuom on GitHub) passed away on the 4th of March. Kalevi's son > Risto passed on this news to me and some others by email yesterday. > > I never met Kalevi in person but we had many conversations online over > many years. Kalevi was an outstanding SymPy contributor and was > involved with the project long before me and so there are others here > who have known him much longer than I have. Kalevi guided many SymPy > contributors and supervised many GSOC students over many years. > Looking in the git history his earliest commit was from almost exactly > 10 years ago. > > Personally I learnt a huge amount from Kalevi and I am very grateful > for the time he took to teach me and others and to guide the project > generally. Kalevi's expertise in many areas of Mathematics and across > the full depth of many parts of the SymPy codebase was unmatched > within the community. > > Interacting through GitHub I guess that many of us did not realise > that Kalevi's health was in decline. He continued to be involved > including most recently reviewing a pull request just 6 weeks ago. A > few weeks ago he sent me some files with what he was most recently > working on but was no longer able to finish. I will try to complete > that work and submit it as Kalevi's final pull request. > > Kalevi's passing is a huge loss to SymPy but I don't want to dwell on > that. Instead I invite those of us who have known Kalevi to share > their thoughts and memories here. > > Oscar > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sympy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/b4b14f2a-7663-4093-97be-814bf034c4fcn%40googlegroups.com.
