Mathematical Plotting with Matplotlib

Plotting is a fundamental tool in all of mathematics. A good plot can reveal hidden details, suggest future directions, verify results, or reinforce an argument. It is no surprise, then, that the scientific Python stack features a powerful and flexible plotting library called Matplotlib.

In this chapter, we will plot functions and data in a variety of styles and create figures that are fully labeled and annotated. We will create three-dimensional plots, customize the appearance of figures, create figures that contain multiple plots using subplots, and save figures directly to files for applications that are not running in an interactive environment.

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Basic plotting with Matplotlib
• Changing the plotting style
• Adding labels and legends to plots
• Adding subplots
• Saving Matplotlib figures
• Surface and contour plots
• Customizing three-dimensional plots