title: How to perform infinite sum numerically in python
body: <p>I am moving from Maple to python for my mathematical programming.  As part of this I am trying to work out what the right tools are to perform infinite sums numerically.</p>
  <p>I would like to compute numerically for example:</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>sum(exp(-x^2), x = -infinity..infinity)</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>In Maple this would just be</p>
  <blockquote>
  <blockquote>
  <p>evalf(sum(exp(-x^2), x = -infinity..infinity));</p>
  </blockquote>
  <pre><code>                             1.772637205
  </code></pre>
  </blockquote>
  <p>Can you do something similar in python, perhaps using the scientific python ecosystem (scipy,numpy, sympy etc)?</p>