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

Linear algebra methods in SciPy


SciPy offers a large range of methods from numerical linear algebra in its scipy.linalg module. Many of these methods are Python wrapping programs from LAPACK, a collection of well-approved FORTRAN subroutines used to solve linear equation systems and eigenvalue problems. Linear algebra methods are the core of any method in scientific computing, and the fact that SciPy uses wrappers instead of pure Python code makes these central methods extremely fast. We present in detail here how two linear algebra problems are solved with SciPy to give you a flavour of this module.

Solving several linear equation systems with LU

Let A be an n × n matrix and b1 , b2 , ..., bk  be a sequence of n-vectors. We consider the problem to find n vectors xi such that:

We assume that the vectors bi are not known simultaneously. In particular, it is quite a common situation that the ith problem has to be solved before bi+1 becomes available.

LU factorization is a way to organize...