The rise and rise of Python in computational science
One of my plans for next year is to start giving short talks and tutorials about scientific Python to various groups around the University of Manchester. Ever since I attended EuroSciPy in Leipzig earlier this year I have been excited about the possibilities offered by Python for students, researchers and teachers. I genuinely believe that Python and SAGE will do for MATLAB and Mathematica users what R has done for users of SPSS and Stata. It’s the future…I’ve tasted it! Here are a few links to others who agree with me.
- Scientific Python tools use rising in education – a blog post from Fernando Perez
- A hands-on 2-day workshop at UC Berkeley – includes videotaped lectures
- Python for High Performance Computing (HPC)
- Should I switch to Python – Are you a MATLAB user considering the switch?
- Python in the Scientific World – From Guido van Rossum – Pythons benevolent dictator
Earlier this week I mentioned my plans to a colleague of mine over coffee and he said “Cool, I didn’t realise that you were a Python expert!”
Of course I’m NOT an expert on Python but it turns out that you just don’t have to be an expert in Python in order to get useful stuff done and THAT is my point!
Here is a word from the Benevolent Dictator For Life about scientific python.
What a coincidence – the guys I work with and I are working on a book about Python/OOP in computational physics!
@Tom Thanks for that – I’ve added it to the list in the main post
@Connor – That’s awesome! Feel free to send me a review copy
@Mike – It’s still a ways (looooong ways) out, but I’d love to when it gets done! ^_^
Just want to point out Maxima (and the wxmaxima frontend) as another very good OSS symbolic math system.
Also check out SimPy at http://simpy.sourceforge.net/
It’s an awesome discrete event simulation system for Python. Nothing even comes close to it. I’ve looked for others since my favorite language is Perl, but I could not find anything in Perl, Python, Ruby, or even C that does what SimPy can do.
Guido, Python founder, was recently honored at UC Berkeley Py4Science, see https://cirl.berkeley.edu/view/Py4Science — for latest developments and projects.
Persistence of data is obviously very important in scientific computation. Data can be simply seen as Python objects (numbers, strings, lists, dictionaries, classes, etc). There is a project which warehouses such objects using a single Python module called y_serial, see http://yserial.sourceforge.net under fast and easy NoSQL. Developers from the scientific community are welcome to join.
I certainly hope so. Would you mind making a post about using python for computational physics? Also, i know about CPython, is there something like FortranPython? would that be a good thing?