GSoC Week 5 - Things make sense

A Better Approach with Lagrange’s Method

My mentor was incredibly helpful and shared a much cleaner version of the example. One of the biggest improvements was switching from Kane’s Method to Lagrange’s Method. That change made a huge difference suddenly the symbolic math wasn’t overwhelming anymore. It became manageable and (dare I say) pleasant to work with.

To handle the trickier parts around tangent points, I used something called radial approximation, a fairly standard simplification trick. That smoothed things out even more. The result? A fully working example with no hardcoded values. I’m just waiting on a review now.

In the meantime, I’ve started writing the documentation for the example because the goal isn’t just to get the code running. The goal is to show how to actually use the WrappingSphere class in practice to our end users.

Reworking point_on_surface

Another big decision this week was about the point_on_surface method in the wrapping geometry classes. There was a discussion with Oscar Benjamin, and we decided not to deprecate it. Instead me and my mentor decided that the method will now return a symbolic equation rather than a boolean.

This gives users more flexibility especially in complex scenarios where a yes/no answer just doesn’t cut it. We also agreed there’s no need to check if points are on the surface before calculating the geodesic length, which simplified things even more.

Honestly, I’m really happy with how things are going. These past few weeks have been a learning curve, but with my mentor’s guidance, things are starting to make a lot more sense.