Book Image

Scientific Computing with Python - Second Edition

By : Claus Führer, Jan Erik Solem, Olivier Verdier
Book Image

Scientific Computing with Python - Second Edition

By: Claus Führer, Jan Erik Solem, Olivier Verdier

Overview of this book

Python has tremendous potential within the scientific computing domain. This updated edition of Scientific Computing with Python features new chapters on graphical user interfaces, efficient data processing, and parallel computing to help you perform mathematical and scientific computing efficiently using Python. This book will help you to explore new Python syntax features and create different models using scientific computing principles. The book presents Python alongside mathematical applications and demonstrates how to apply Python concepts in computing with the help of examples involving Python 3.8. You'll use pandas for basic data analysis to understand the modern needs of scientific computing, and cover data module improvements and built-in features. You'll also explore numerical computation modules such as NumPy and SciPy, which enable fast access to highly efficient numerical algorithms. By learning to use the plotting module Matplotlib, you will be able to represent your computational results in talks and publications. A special chapter is devoted to SymPy, a tool for bridging symbolic and numerical computations. By the end of this Python book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of task automation and how to implement and test mathematical algorithms within the realm of scientific computing.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
20
About Packt
22
References

6.4 Making movies from plots

If you have data that evolves, you might want to save it as a movie as well as showing it in a figure window, similar to the command savefig. One way to do this is with the module visvis, see [37]

Here is a simple example of evolving a circle using an implicit representation. Let the circle be represented by the zero level, 

of a function .

Alternatively, consider the disk  inside the zero set of . If the value of decreases at a rate , then the circle will move outward at the rate .

This can be implemented as:

import visvis.vvmovie as vv

# create initial function values
x = linspace(-255,255,511)
X,Y = meshgrid(x,x)
f = sqrt(X*X+Y*Y) - 40 #radius 40

# evolve and store in a list
imlist = []
for iteration in range(200):
    imlist.append((f>0)*255)
    f -= 1 # move outwards one pixel
vv.images2swf.writeSwf('circle_evolution.swf',imlist)

The result is a flash movie (*.swf file) of a growing...