.. _aboutyt:

About yt
========

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What is yt?
-----------

yt is a toolkit for analyzing and visualizing quantitative data.  Originally
written to analyze 3D grid-based astrophysical simulation data, 
it has grown to handle any kind of data represented in a 2D or 3D volume.
yt is an Python-based open source project and is open for anyone to use or 
contribute code.  The entire source code and history is available to all 
at https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt .

.. _who-is-yt:

Who is yt?
----------

As an open-source project, yt has a large number of user-developers.  
In September of 2014, the yt developer community collectively decided to endow 
the title of *member* on individuals who had contributed in a significant way 
to the project.  For a list of those members and a description of their 
contributions to the code, see 
`our members website. <http://yt-project.org/members.html>`_

For an up-to-date list of everyone who has contributed to the yt codebase, 
see the current `CREDITS <http://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/src/yt/CREDITS>`_ file.  
For a more detailed breakup of contributions made by individual users, see out 
`Open HUB page <https://www.openhub.net/p/yt_amr/contributors?query=&sort=commits>`_.

History of yt
-------------

yt was originally begun by Matthew Turk in 2007 in the course of his graduate
studies in computational astrophysics.  The code was developed
as a simple data-reader and exporter for grid-based hydrodynamical simulation 
data outputs from the *Enzo* code.  Over the next few years, he invited 
collaborators and friends to contribute and use yt.  As the community grew,
so did the capabilities of yt.  It is now a community-developed project with 
contributions from many people, the hospitality of several institutions, and 
benefiting from numerous grants.  With this community-driven approach 
and contributions from a sizeable population of developers, it has evolved 
into a fully-featured toolkit for analysis and visualization of 
multidimensional data.  It relies on no proprietary software -- although it 
can be and has been extended to interface with proprietary software and 
libraries -- and has been designed from the ground up to enable users to be 
as immersed in the data as they desire.

How do I contact yt?
--------------------

If you have any questions about the code, please contact the `yt users email
list <http://lists.spacepope.org/listinfo.cgi/yt-users-spacepope.org>`_.  If
you're having other problems, please follow the steps in 
:ref:`asking-for-help`.

How do I cite yt?
-----------------

If you use yt in a publication, we'd very much appreciate a citation!  You
should feel free to cite the `ApJS paper
<http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011ApJS..192....9T>`_ with the following BibTeX
entry: ::

   @ARTICLE{2011ApJS..192....9T,
      author = {{Turk}, M.~J. and {Smith}, B.~D. and {Oishi}, J.~S. and {Skory}, S. and 
   	{Skillman}, S.~W. and {Abel}, T. and {Norman}, M.~L.},
       title = "{yt: A Multi-code Analysis Toolkit for Astrophysical Simulation Data}",
     journal = {\apjs},
   archivePrefix = "arXiv",
      eprint = {1011.3514},
    primaryClass = "astro-ph.IM",
    keywords = {cosmology: theory, methods: data analysis, methods: numerical },
        year = 2011,
       month = jan,
      volume = 192,
       pages = {9-+},
         doi = {10.1088/0067-0049/192/1/9},
      adsurl = {http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011ApJS..192....9T},
     adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
   }
