Book Image

Learning SciPy for Numerical and Scientific Computing Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Learning SciPy for Numerical and Scientific Computing Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

This book targets programmers and scientists who have basic Python knowledge and who are keen to perform scientific and numerical computations with SciPy.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)
9
Index

The evaluation of special functions


The scipy.special module contains numerically stable definitions of useful functions. Most often, the straightforward evaluation of a function at a single value is not very efficient. For instance, we would rather use a Horner scheme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horner%27s_method) to find the value of a polynomial at a point than use the raw formula. The NumPy and SciPy modules ensure that this optimization is always guaranteed with the definition of all its functions, whether by means of Horner schemes or with more advanced techniques.