Book Image

IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook

By : Cyrille Rossant
Book Image

IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook

By: Cyrille Rossant

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (22 chapters)
IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


Mathematical optimization is a wide area of applied mathematics. It consists of finding the best solution to a given problem. Many real-world problems can be expressed in an optimization framework. What is the shortest path on the road from point A to point B? What is the best strategy to solve a puzzle? What is the most energy-efficient shape of a car (automotive aerodynamics)? Mathematical optimization is relevant in many domains including engineering, economics, finance, operations research, image processing, data analysis, and others.

Mathematically, an optimization problem generally consists of finding the maximum or minimum value of a function. We sometimes use the terms continuous optimization or discrete optimization, according to whether the function variable is real-valued or discrete.

In this chapter, we will focus on numerical methods for solving continuous optimization problems. Many optimization algorithms are implemented in the scipy.optimize module. We will come...