Numpy and Scipy
Numpy and Scipy¶
In this section we introduce the numpy and scipy packages that you will certainly use and will need to know for this course.
numpy focuses on the efficient manipulation of structured data that in many languages would already be included as some sort of array data type. numpy provides routines to do many operations on arrays of data such as sorting, finding the largest or smallest element, transposing data and so on. It also provides many mathematical operations including the expected (element-by-element) functions (trigonometry, exponentials etc).
numpy also provides an extensive overloading of the standard operators for manipulating lists of data (etc) that make array operations quite natural and compact in python. It is very important to understand what numpy is doing because it is almost impossible to avoid close encounters with these operators in everyday python.
numpy has been very carefully optimised and, used correctly, will give you access to very efficient (mostly that means fast) code without having to leave the python environment. This means you should always look to see if there is a numpy function to do what you need and never write a python loop if you can help it.
Introduction To Numpy - This notebook goes into more detail about why we need
numpy, what the operator overloading looks like, and explores the speed benefits of usingnumpy. The other benefits are readability of your code (as long as you understand the operator overloading) and reliability because you are using pre-built code, not writing your own loops.The game of life 1 - This notebook sets up an exercise: the game of life, to show how
numpyworks in a real problem. We will see how to approach problems of structured data so that we can most of the work efficiently withnumpy.The game of life 2 - Here we have a chance to reflect on the choices we made in the previous notebook and think about how things could be done better (or differently, anyway).
These notebooks are not intended to be comprehensive because you will have lots of opportunity to practice looking at numpy code when we look at satellite images and basemaps in the cartopy mapping examples, and the stripy spherical meshing examples.
scipy is a collection of useful algorithms loosely bundled together. If you have ever come across the book “Numerical Recipes” then you will know what scipy is trying to do: there is usually some reasonable implementation in scipy for whatever problem you are faced with: interpolation, optimisation, meshing, image manipulation. It is neither comprehensive nor definitive but, like a Swiss-Army Knife, more useful in a pinch than most other tools.
Introduction - Really just a list of modules that
scipyprovides. Each of the modules is a collection of related functionality that has a mostly-consistent user interface.