Basic Packages, Functions, and Concepts

Before getting started on any practical recipes, we'll use this opening chapter to introduce several core mathematical concepts and structures and their Python representations. In particular, we'll look at basic numerical types, basic mathematical functions (trigonometric functions, the exponential function, and logarithms), and matrices. Matrices are fundamental in most computational applications because of the connection between matrices and solutions of systems of linear equations. We'll explore some of these applications in this chapter, but matrices will play an important role throughout this book.

We'll cover the following main topics in this order:

• Python numerical types
• Basic mathematical functions
• NumPy arrays
• Matrices