
Learning IPython for Interactive Computing and Data Visualization, Second Edition
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Vector computing is about efficiently performing mathematical operations on numerical arrays. Many problems in science and engineering actually consist of a sequence of such operations.
This section introduces and demonstrates the multidimensional array data type for numerical computing.
What is a multidimensional array? Consider a vector containing 1000 real numbers. It has one dimension, since numbers are stored along a single axis. Now, consider a matrix with 1000 rows and 1000 columns. It contains 1,000,000 numbers. Because it has two dimensions, you need to specify both the row and column to refer to a specific number.
More generally, an n-dimensional array, also called ndarray, is an n-dimensional matrix (or tensor). Every number is identified by n indices (i_1, ... i_n)
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Many types of real-world data can be represented as ndarrays:
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