William Scullin’s talk from PyCon 2011: Python for high performance computing. At least in our shop [Argonne National Laboratory] we have three accepted languages for scientific computing. In this order they are C/C++, Fortran in all its dialects, and Python.…
Blog Archives
Scientific Python on Twitter
Next week I’m starting a new daily tip Twitter account: @SciPyTip. This account will post on things related to scientific computing in Python, including the SciPy library, related software, and scientific computing in general. Full list of daily tip accounts
Ruby, Python, and Science
David Jacobs has written a long blog post Ruby is beautiful (but I’m moving to Python). Here’s my summary. Ruby is much better than Java, but the Ruby community is too focused on web development and the language has no…
Bug in SciPy’s erf function
Last night I produced the plot below and was very surprised at the jagged spike. I knew the curve should be smooth and strictly increasing. My first thought was that there must be a numerical accuracy problem in my code,…
Replacing Mathematica with Python
Everything I do regularly in Mathematica can be done in Python. Even though Mathematica has a mind-boggling amount of functionality, I only use a tiny proportion of it. I skimmed through some of my Mathematica files to see what functions…
SciPy and NumPy for .NET
Travis Oliphant announced this morning at the SciPy 2010 conference that Microsoft is partnering with Enthought to produce a version of NumPy and SciPy for .NET. NumPy and SciPy are Python libraries for scientific computing. Oliphant is the president of…
Using py2exe with SciPy
py2exe is a program that takes Python code and produces a Windows executable that can run on computers that do not have Python installed. My focus here is in using py2exe on Python code that depends on SciPy.
Python code for computing distribution parameters from percentiles
A few days ago I wrote a post on finding parameters so that a probability distribution satisfies two percentile conditions. Since then I’ve written Python code to carry out the calculations described in that article and the accompanying technical report.…
Probability distribution parameterizations in SciPy
Parameterizations are the bane of statistical software. One of the most common errors is to assume that one software package uses the same parameterization as another package. For example, some packages specify the exponential distribution in terms of the mean…
Tagged with: Probability and Statistics, Python, SciPy
Posted in Python, Software development, Statistics
Posted in Python, Software development, Statistics
Getting started with SciPy (Scientific Python)
CodeProject just published my article Getting Started with SciPy (Scientific Python)
IEEE floating point arithmetic in Python
Sometimes a number is not a number. Numeric data types represent real numbers in a computer fairly well most of the time, but sometimes the abstraction leaks. The sum of two numeric types is always a numeric type, but the…
Probability distributions in SciPy
Here are some notes on how to work with probability distributions using the SciPy numerical library for Python. Functions related to probability distributions are located in scipy.stats. The general pattern is scipy.stats.<distribution family>.<function> There are 81 supported continuous distribution families…
Numerical computing in IronPython with Ironclad
In a previous post, I discuss my difficulties calling some Python modules from IronPython. In particular I wanted to call SciPy from IronPython and couldn’t. The discussion following that post brought up Ironclad as a possible solution. I wanted to…
Comparing statistical packages: R, SAS, SPSS, etc.
Interesting post from Brendan O’Connor: Comparison of data analysis packages: R, Matlab, SciPy, Excel, SAS, SPSS, Stata
IronPython is a one-way gate
IronPython opens up the world of .NET to Python programmers. It’s not as good yet at opening up the world of Python to .NET programmers. It is easy to write .NET applications in IronPython. I typed in some sample code…
