Fernando's blog

It's pretty clear to me that Python is rapidly growing in acceptance as a computational platform at universities everywhere. I recently heard from Josh Bloom at UC Berkeley astronomy that his proposal for a short 'boot camp' course at the beginning of the Fall semester was approved. This is excellent news, last year I taught something similar for neuroscience students and postdocs, and I'm glad to see the campus adopting python further as a key component of the computational training the science students receive. John Hunter and I just completed a few days ago teaching another such workshop at the Claremont Colleges, supported by an NSF grant that John Milton , (J. Hunter's PhD advisor) has for exposing undergraduates to a number of research-related experiences. This grant supports summer research internships where two undergrads visit together a research lab away from their home campus to work independently on a project, as well as our teaching of scient...

Update: Quick links Video of the entire session. The talks cover the first 50 minutes, and Guido's part starts at the 54 minute mark. A page with all the slides on my site. Guido also blogged his impressions. Blog posts by Jarrod Millman and Matthew Brett . On November 4 2009, we had a special session of our informal Py4Science seminar where Guido van Rossum visited for an open discussion regarding the uses of the Python language in scientific research. Guido had expressed his interest in discussing the work that various scientists do with Python but mentioned that instead of a formal talk, he would prefer a format that allowed for more interaction with the audience. We agreed that a good plan would be for us to present a rapid-fire sequence of very short talks highlighting multiple projects so that he could get a good "high altitude" view of the scientific python landscape, leaving then ample time for discussions with the audience. Guido has already post...

CSE'09 article in SIAM News This isn't fresh-off-the-oven news, but it's still on the main SIAM News page, so I'll mention it as I am trying to do a better job of keeping up with this blog... As I mentioned on a previous post , our three part minisymposium on Python at the SIAM CSE09 conference was fairly well received. But even better, SIAM asked us to write up an article for publication in the SIAM News bulletin . I was really pleased with this, as SIAM News reaches a very broad international audience and is actually read by people. I often find very interesting material in it, as the publication hits a very good balance of quality and not being overly specialized (as we all drown in work, we tend to focus only on very narrow publication lists for everyday reading, unfortunately). Randy, Hans-Petter and I drafted up an article, and we received great feedback from all of the presenters at the minisymposium, including figure contributions by John Hunter an...

We recently conducted a poll on Doodle, soliciting feedback on the preferred topics for the advanced track, which is meant to contain 2 days with 8 2-hour sessions focusing on one specific topic at a time. The table below shows the complete results, which I've only sorted for convenient viewing and anonymized (the raw Doodle output contains the names given by each person voting). If anyone would like the raw spreadsheet, just drop me a line. The score was computed as #yes-#no (i.e., yes=+1, neutral=0, no=-1), from a total of 30 responses, and the results are in the table below, ranked from highest to lowest score. In my personal opinion, all the topics offered would have made for very good and interesting tutorials, but the point of asking for feedback is obviously to follow it to some degree, which we will now do. I think it's worth noting --though not particularly surprising-- that the ranking roughly follows the generality of the tools: matplotlib and numpy are at th...

After the success of last year's Python minisymposium at the annual SIAM meeting, this year we had a repeat: Simula's Hans-Petter Langtangen (author of the well-known Python Scripting for Computational Science ), U. Washington's Randy LeVeque and I co-organized another minisymposium on Python for Scientific computing. At the Computational Science and Engineering 2009 meeting , held in downtown Miami March 2-6, we had again 3 sessions with 4 talks each ( part I , II and III ), with a different mix of speakers and focus than last year. While last year we spent some effort introducing the language and to a certain extent justyfing its use in real-world scientific work, we felt that this time, the growth of the many python projects out there speaks for itself and that we should instead turn our attention to actual tools and projects useful for specific work. Thus, we had no 'why python for science' talk, although obviously most speakers spent some time providing ...

Update : I've slightly modified the language of this review, which as my wife correctly pointed out to me, was unnecessarily harsh. While I stand by my previous evaluation of the book, I think the same things can be said in a more constructive tone. While this isn't strictly a SciPy post, I've already have a few questions about this book, so I guess I'll tag it as 'scipy' as well, for those interested. I recently reviewed the book Expert Python Programming by Tarek Ziadé. While not aimed at a scientific audience, the book covers a number of topics that we frequently discuss on the Numpy and Scipy lists (such as documentation and testing, workflows, API decisions, etc). Since I really prefer to write longer text in reST using Emacs than in a blog editor, I've posted the review over at my static site. Feel free to head over there if you are interested in the full review , I've only reproduced here the summary:   Summary Expert Python Progra...