Ivan Idris - NumPy Beginners Guide

Ivan Idris has an MSc in Experimental Physics. His graduation thesis had a strong emphasis on Applied Computer Science. After graduating, he worked for several companies as a Java Developer, Datawarehouse Developer, and QA Analyst. His main professional interests are Business Intelligence, Big Data, and Cloud Computing. Ivan Idris enjoys writing clean testable code and interesting technical articles. Ivan Idris is the author of NumPy Beginner's Guide & Cookbook. You can find more information and a blog with a few NumPy examples at ivanidris.net.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the reviewers and the team at Packt Publishing for making this book possible. Also thanks goes to my teachers, professors, and colleagues who taught me about science and programming. Last but not the least, I would like to acknowledge my parents, family, and friends for their support.

Jaidev Deshpande is an intern at Enthought, Inc, where he works on software for data analysis and visualization. He is an avid scientific programmer and works on many open source packages in signal processing, data analysis, and machine learning.

Dr. Alexandre Devert is teaching data-mining and software engineering at the University of Science and Technology of China. Alexandre also works as a researcher, both as an academic on optimization problems, and on data-mining problems for a biotechnology startup. In all those contexts, Alexandre very happily uses Python, Numpy, and Scipy.

Mark Livingstone started his career by working for many years for three international computer companies (which no longer exist) in engineering/support/programming/training roles, but got tired of being made redundant. He then graduated from Griffith University on the Gold Coast, Australia, in 2011 with a Bachelor of Information Technology. He is currently in his final semester of his B.InfoTech (Hons) degree researching in the area of Proteomics algorithms with all his research software written in Python on a Mac, and his Supervisor and research group one by one discovering the joys of Python.

Mark enjoys mentoring first year students with special needs, is the Chair of the IEEE Griffith University Gold Coast Student Branch, and volunteers as a Qualified Justice of the Peace at the local District Courthouse, has been a Credit Union Director, and will have completed 100 blood donations by the end of 2013.

In his copious spare time, he co-develops the S2 Salstat Statistics Package available at http://code.google.com/p/salstat-statistics-package-2/ which is multiplatform and uses wxPython, NumPy, SciPy, Scikit, Matplotlib, and a number of other Python modules.

Mikls Prisznyk is a senior software engineer with a scientific background. He graduated as a physicist from the Etvs Lrnd University, the largest and oldest university in Hungary. He did his MSc thesis on Monte Carlo simulations of non-Abelian lattice quantum field theories in 1992. Having worked three years in the Central Research Institute for Physics of Hungary, he joined MultiRci Kft. in Budapest, a company founded by physicists, which specialized in mathematical data analysis and forecasting economic data. His main project was the Small Area Unemployment Statistics System which has been in official use at the Hungarian Public Employment Service since then. He learned about the Python programming language here in 2000. He set up his own consulting company in 2002 and then he worked on various projects for insurance, pharmacy and e-commerce companies, using Python whenever he could. He also worked in a European Union research institute in Italy, testing and enhanching a distributed, Python-based Zope/Plone web application. He moved to Great Britain in 2007 and first he worked at a Scottish start-up, using Twisted Python, then in the aerospace industry in England using, among others, the PyQt windowing toolkit, the Enthought application framework, and the NumPy and SciPy libraries. He returned to Hungary in 2012 and he rejoined MultiRci where now he is working on a Python extension module to OpenOffice/EuroOffice, using NumPy and SciPy again, which will allow users to solve non-linear and stochastic optimization problems. Mikls likes to travel, read, and he is interested in sciences, linguistics, history, politics, the board game of go, and in quite a few other topics. Besides he always enjoys a good cup of coffee. However, nothing beats spending time with his brilliant 10 year old son Zsombor for him.

Nikolay Karelin holds a PhD degree in optics and used various methods of numerical simulations and analysis for nearly 20 years, first in academia and then in the industry (simulation of fiber optics communication links). After initial learning curve with Python and NumPy, these excellent tools became his main choice for almost all numerical analysis and scripting, since past five years.

I wish to thank my family for understanding and keeping patience during long evenings when I was working on reviews for the "NumPy Beginners Guide."