By far the most common way to indicate complex numbers in code is by postfixing an i, j, or im to a number. Ex: 3 + 4i. This is based on the old pen-on-paper notation in math, physics and electrical engineering (who use j). There's also a nice "phasor" notation, which uses angle-n-magnitude instead of real-n-imaginary coordinates: 5 ∠ 53.13°, though font designers usually create awful ∠ symbols (often very tiny, for some reason), making them unreliable to use in code. [Read more…]

With things running smoothly with my SciPy setup, I have been having fun trying out new libraries. Here's just a short list of some that I have been playing with. [Read more…]

What follows is my collection of notes about installing a full 64-bit stack of NumPy, SciPy, PyLab, and all that entails on a fresh Snow Leopard system. If it helps out someone else trying to do something similar that would be great. If you look through what I've done and find things that could have been done better or in a more correct way, let me know. We will be building most things needed from source.

After trial and error, and plenty of the latter, I have streamlined the process down to installing the following, in order: gfortran, FFTW, UMFPACK, NumPy, SciPy and finally matplotlib (which includes PyLab). [Read more…]