Book Image

Scientific Computing with Python 3

By : Claus Führer, Jan Erik Solem, Olivier Verdier
Book Image

Scientific Computing with Python 3

By: Claus Führer, Jan Erik Solem, Olivier Verdier

Overview of this book

Python can be used for more than just general-purpose programming. It is a free, open source language and environment that has tremendous potential for use within the domain of scientific computing. This book presents Python in tight connection with mathematical applications and demonstrates how to use various concepts in Python for computing purposes, including examples with the latest version of Python 3. Python is an effective tool to use when coupling scientific computing and mathematics and this book will teach you how to use it for linear algebra, arrays, plotting, iterating, functions, polynomials, and much more.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Scientific Computing with Python 3
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Acknowledgement
Preface
References

Introduction to classes


We will illustrate the concept of classes with an example of rational numbers, that is, numbers of the form q= qN ⁄ qD, where qN and qD are integers.

Figure 8.1: An example of a class declaration

We use rational numbers here only as an example for the class concept. For future work in Python with rational numbers use the fractions module (refer to [6]).

Class syntax

The definition of a class is made by a block command with the class keyword, the name of the class, and some statements in the block (refer to Figure 8.1):

class RationalNumber: 
      pass

An instance of this class (or in other words, an object of the type RationalNumber) is created by

r = RationalNumber()

and a query type(a) returns the answer,  <class'__main__.RationalNumber'>. If we want to investigate whether an object is an instance of this class, we can use this:

if isinstance(a, RationalNumber):
    print('Indeed it belongs to the class RationalNumber')  

So far we've generated an object...