Mathematical Plotting with Matplotlib
Plotting is a fundamental tool in all of mathematics. A good plot can reveal hidden details, suggest future directions, verify results, or reinforce an argument. It is no surprise, then, that the scientific Python stack features a powerful and flexible plotting library called Matplotlib.
In this chapter, we will plot functions and data in a variety of styles and create figures that are fully labeled and annotated. We will create three-dimensional plots, customize the appearance of figures, create figures that contain multiple plots using subplots, and save figures directly to files for applications that are not running in an interactive environment.
Plotting is one of the most important aspects covered in this book. Plotting data, functions, or solutions can often help you gain an understanding of a problem that can really help to reason about your methods. We will see plotting again in every chapter of this book.
In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:
- Basic plotting with Matplotlib
- Adding subplots
- Plotting with error bars
- Saving Matplotlib figures
- Surface and contour plots
- Customizing three-dimensional plots
- Plotting vector fields with quiver plots
