Book Image

Learning SciPy for Numerical and Scientific Computing

By : Francisco J. Blanco-Silva
Book Image

Learning SciPy for Numerical and Scientific Computing

By: Francisco J. Blanco-Silva

Overview of this book

<p>It's essential to incorporate workflow data and code from various sources in order to create fast and effective algorithms to solve complex problems in science and engineering. Data is coming at us faster, dirtier, and at an ever increasing rate. There is no need to employ difficult-to-maintain code, or expensive mathematical engines to solve your numerical computations anymore. SciPy guarantees fast, accurate, and easy-to-code solutions to your numerical and scientific computing applications.<br /><br />"Learning SciPy for Numerical and Scientific Computing" unveils secrets to some of the most critical mathematical and scientific computing problems and will play an instrumental role in supporting your research. The book will teach you how to quickly and efficiently use different modules and routines from the SciPy library to cover the vast scope of numerical mathematics with its simplistic practical approach that's easy to follow.<br /><br />The book starts with a brief description of the SciPy libraries, showing practical demonstrations for acquiring and installing them on your system. This is followed by the second chapter which is a fun and fast-paced primer to array creation, manipulation, and problem-solving based on these techniques.<br /><br />The rest of the chapters describe the use of all different modules and routines from the SciPy libraries, through the scope of different branches of numerical mathematics. Each big field is represented: numerical analysis, linear algebra, statistics, signal processing, and computational geometry. And for each of these fields all possibilities are illustrated with clear syntax, and plenty of examples. The book then presents combinations of all these techniques to the solution of research problems in real-life scenarios for different sciences or engineering — from image compression, biological classification of species, control theory, design of wings, to structural analysis of oxides.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Array routines


In this section we will deal with most operations with arrays. We will classify them in four main categories, as follows:

  • Routines for the creation of new arrays

  • Routines for the manipulation of a single array

  • Routines for the combination of two or more arrays

  • Routines to extract information from arrays

The reader will surely realize that some operations of this kind can be carried out by methods, which once again shows the flexibility of Python and NumPy.

Routines for array creation

We have seen the basic command that brings an array to memory and stores it to a variable – A=numpy.array([[1,2],[2,1]]). The complete syntax is as follows:

array(object=,dtype=None,copy=True,order=None,subox=False,ndim=0)

Let us go over the options; object is simply the data we use to initialize the array. In the previous example, that object is a small 2 x 2 square matrix; we may impose a determinate datatype with the dtype option. The result is stored in the variable A; if copy is false, the returned...