Scientific and numerical computing is a booming field in research, engineering, and
analytics. The revolution in the computer industry over the last several decades has
provided new and powerful tools for computational practitioners. This has enabled
computational undertakings of previously unprecedented scale and complexity. Entire
fields and industries have sprung up as a result. This development is still ongoing, and
it is creating new opportunities as hardware, software, and algorithms keep improving.
Ultimately the enabling technology for this movement is the powerful computing
hardware that has been developed in recent decades. However, for a computational
practitioner, the software environment used for computational work is as important as, if
not more important than, the hardware on which the computations are carried out. This
book is about one popular and fast-growing environment for numerical computing: the
Python programming language and its vibrant ecosystem of libraries and extensions for
computational work.
