NumPy & SciPy with Travis Oliphant

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00:49:31

January 27th, 2021

49 mins 31 secs

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About this Episode

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Travis Oliphant (@teoliphant) take a far-reaching tour through the history of the Python data community. Travis has had a hand in the creation of many open-source projects, most notably the influential libraries, NumPy and SciPy, which helped cement Python as the standard for scientific computing. Join us for the story of a fledgling community from a time “before open-source was cool,” and their lessons for today’s open-source landscape.

In this episode we discuss:

  • How biomedical engineering, MRIs, and an unhappy tenure committee led to NumPy and SciPy
  • Overcoming early challenges of distribution with Python
  • What Travis would have done differently when he wrote NumPy
  • Successfully solving the “two-option split” by adding a third option
  • Community-driven open-source interacting with company-backed open-source

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