Chapter 1. Introduction to SciPy

There is no doubt that the labor of scientists in the twenty-first century is more comprehensive and interdisciplinary than in previous generations. Members of scientific communities connect in larger teams and work together on mission-oriented goals and across their fields. This paradigm on research is also reflected in the computational resources employed by researchers. No longer are researchers restricted to one type of commercial software, operating system, or vendor, but inspired by open source contributions made available and tested by research institutions and open source communities; research work often spans over various platforms and technologies.

This book presents the highly-recognized open source programming environment till date — a system based on two libraries of the computer language Python: NumPy and SciPy. In the following sections, we will guide you through examples from science and engineering on the usage of this system.