Three-dimensional plots

Two-dimensional plots are the bread and butter of data visualization. However, if you want to show off, nothing beats a good three-dimensional plot. I was in charge of a software package that could draw contour plots and three-dimensional plots. The software could even draw plots that when viewed with special glasses would pop right in front of you.

The matplotlib API has the Axes3D class for three-dimensional plots. By demonstrating how this class works, we will also show how the object-oriented matplotlib API works. The matplotlib Figure class is a top-level container for chart elements:

1. Create a Figure object as follows:

   fig = plt.figure()

2. Create an Axes3D object from the Figure object:

   ax = Axes3D(fig)

3. The years and CPU transistor counts will be our x and y axes. It is required to create coordinate matrices from the years and CPU transistor counts arrays. Create the coordinate matrices with the NumPy meshgrid() function:

   X, Y = np.meshgrid(X, Y)

4. Plot the data with the...