SciPy 1.0--Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific Computing in Python
It provides a widely adopted library for scientific computing in Python, benefiting researchers and developers across various domains, but is incremental as it builds on long-term community development.
The paper describes SciPy 1.0, a fundamental open-source library for scientific computing in Python, released in 2017 after 16 years of development, which has become a standard tool used in millions of downloads and projects including machine learning and high-profile scientific analyses.
SciPy is an open source scientific computing library for the Python programming language. SciPy 1.0 was released in late 2017, about 16 years after the original version 0.1 release. SciPy has become a de facto standard for leveraging scientific algorithms in the Python programming language, with more than 600 unique code contributors, thousands of dependent packages, over 100,000 dependent repositories, and millions of downloads per year. This includes usage of SciPy in almost half of all machine learning projects on GitHub, and usage by high profile projects including LIGO gravitational wave analysis and creation of the first-ever image of a black hole (M87). The library includes functionality spanning clustering, Fourier transforms, integration, interpolation, file I/O, linear algebra, image processing, orthogonal distance regression, minimization algorithms, signal processing, sparse matrix handling, computational geometry, and statistics. In this work, we provide an overview of the capabilities and development practices of the SciPy library and highlight some recent technical developments.