Alexandre Devert is a computer scientist. To put his happy obsessions to good use, he decided to solve optimization problems, in both academic and industrial contexts. This included all kinds of optimization problems, such as civil engineering problems, packing problems, logistics problems, biological engineering problems—you name it. It involved throwing lots of science on the wall and seeing what sticks. To do so, he had to analyze and visualize large amounts of data quickly, for which Python, NumPy, Scipy, and Matplotlib excel. Thus, the latter are among the daily tools he has been using for a couple of years. He also lectures on Data mining at the University of Science and Technology of China, and uses those very same tools for demonstration purposes and to enlighten his students with graphics glittering of anti-aliased awesomeness.

Ludovico Fischer is a software developer working in the Netherlands. By day, he builds enterprise applications for large multinational companies. By night, he cultivates his academic interests in mathematics and computer science, and plays with mathematical and scientific software.

Ryan R. Rosario is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles. He works at Riot Games as a Data Scientist, and he enjoys turning large quantities of massive, messy data into gold. He is heavily involved in the open source community, particularly with R, Python, Hadoop, and Machine Learning, and has also contributed code to various Python and R projects. He maintains a blog dedicated to Data Science and related topics at http://www.bytemining.com. He has also served as a technical reviewer for NumPy 1.5 Beginner's Guide.