Book Image

Scientific Computing with Python - Second Edition

By : Claus Führer, Jan Erik Solem, Olivier Verdier
Book Image

Scientific Computing with Python - Second Edition

By: Claus Führer, Jan Erik Solem, Olivier Verdier

Overview of this book

Python has tremendous potential within the scientific computing domain. This updated edition of Scientific Computing with Python features new chapters on graphical user interfaces, efficient data processing, and parallel computing to help you perform mathematical and scientific computing efficiently using Python. This book will help you to explore new Python syntax features and create different models using scientific computing principles. The book presents Python alongside mathematical applications and demonstrates how to apply Python concepts in computing with the help of examples involving Python 3.8. You'll use pandas for basic data analysis to understand the modern needs of scientific computing, and cover data module improvements and built-in features. You'll also explore numerical computation modules such as NumPy and SciPy, which enable fast access to highly efficient numerical algorithms. By learning to use the plotting module Matplotlib, you will be able to represent your computational results in talks and publications. A special chapter is devoted to SymPy, a tool for bridging symbolic and numerical computations. By the end of this Python book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of task automation and how to implement and test mathematical algorithms within the realm of scientific computing.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
20
About Packt
22
References

5.3.2 Using the command where

The command where gives a useful construct that can take a Boolean array as a condition and either return the indexes of the array elements satisfying the condition or return different values depending on the values in the Boolean array.

The basic structure is:

where(condition, a, b)

This will return values from a when the condition is True and values from b when it is False.

For instance, consider a Heaviside function:

and its implementation with the command where:

def H(x):
    return where(x < 0, 0, 1)
x = linspace(-1,1,11)  # [-1. -0.8 -0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0. 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1. ]
print(H(x))            # [0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1]

The second and third arguments can be either arrays of the same size as the condition (the Boolean array) or scalars. We'll give two more examples to demonstrate how to manipulate elements from an array or a scalar depending on a condition:

x = linspace...