Book Image

Applying Math with Python - Second Edition

By : Sam Morley
Book Image

Applying Math with Python - Second Edition

By: Sam Morley

Overview of this book

The updated edition of Applying Math with Python will help you solve complex problems in a wide variety of mathematical fields in simple and efficient ways. Old recipes have been revised for new libraries and several recipes have been added to demonstrate new tools such as JAX. You'll start by refreshing your knowledge of several core mathematical fields and learn about packages covered in Python's scientific stack, including NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib. As you progress, you'll gradually get to grips with more advanced topics of calculus, probability, and networks (graph theory). Once you’ve developed a solid base in these topics, you’ll have the confidence to set out on math adventures with Python as you explore Python's applications in data science and statistics, forecasting, geometry, and optimization. The final chapters will take you through a collection of miscellaneous problems, including working with specific data formats and accelerating code. By the end of this book, you'll have an arsenal of practical coding solutions that can be used and modified to solve a wide range of practical problems in computational mathematics and data science.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Understanding basic mathematical functions

Basic mathematical functions appear in many applications. For example, logarithms can be used to scale data that grows exponentially to give linear data. The exponential function and trigonometric functions are common fixtures when working with geometric information, the gamma function appears in combinatorics, and the Gaussian error function is important in statistics.

The math module in the Python Standard Library provides all of the standard mathematical functions, along with common constants and some utility functions, and it can be imported using the following command:

import math

Once it’s imported, we can use any of the mathematical functions that are contained in this module. For instance, to find the square root of a non-negative number, we would use the sqrt function from math:

import math
math.sqrt(4)  #  2.0

Attempting to use the sqrt function with a negative argument will raise a value...