NumPy is a fundamental Python library for numerical computing. It provides powerful tools for working with multi-dimensional arrays, matrices, and various mathematical functions, making it essential for scientific computing, data analysis, and machine learning.
- NumPy arrays have a fixed size at creation, unlike Python lists (which can grow dynamically). Changing the size of an ndarray will create a new array and delete the original.
- The elements in a NumPy array are all required to be of the same data type, and thus will be the same size in memory. The exception: one can have arrays of (Python, including NumPy) objects, thereby allowing for arrays of different sized elements.
- NumPy arrays facilitate advanced mathematical and other types of operations on large numbers of data. Typically, such operations are executed more efficiently and with less code than is possible using Python’s built-in sequences.
- A growing plethora of scientific and mathematical Python-based packages are using NumPy arrays; though these typically support Python-sequence input, they convert such input to NumPy arrays prior to processing, and they often output NumPy arrays. In other words, in order to efficiently use much (perhaps even most) of today’s scientific/mathematical Python-based software, just knowing how to use Python’s built-in sequence types is insufficient - one also needs to know how to use NumPy arrays.
- NumPy fully supports an object-oriented approach, starting, once again, with ndarray. For example, ndarray is a class, possessing numerous methods and attributes. Many of its methods are mirrored by functions in the outer-most NumPy namespace, allowing the programmer to code in whichever paradigm they prefer. This flexibility has allowed the NumPy array dialect and NumPy ndarray class to become the de-facto language of multi-dimensional data interchange used in Python.
