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You're reading from  Scientific Computing with Python - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inJul 2021
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781838822323
Edition2nd Edition
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Authors (3):
Claus Führer
Claus Führer
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Claus Führer

Claus Führer is a professor of scientific computations at Lund University, Sweden. He has an extensive teaching record that includes intensive programming courses in numerical analysis and engineering mathematics across various levels in many different countries and teaching environments. Claus also develops numerical software in research collaboration with industry and received Lund University's Faculty of Engineering Best Teacher Award in 2016.
Read more about Claus Führer

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Constant functions

One of the most common examples of broadcasting is the addition of a function and a constant; if  is a scalar, we often write:

This is an abuse of notation since you should not be able to add functions and constants. Constants are, however, implicitly broadcast to functions. The broadcast version of the constant  is the function  defined by:

Now it makes sense to add two functions together:

We are not being pedantic for the sake of it, but because a similar situation may arise for arrays, as in the following code:

vector = arange(4) # array([0.,1.,2.,3.])
vector + 1.        # array([1.,2.,3.,4.])

In this example, everything happens as if the scalar 1. had been converted to an array of the same length as vector, that is, array([1.,1.,1.,1.]), and then added to vector.

This example is exceedingly simple, so we'll proceed to show less obvious situations.

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Scientific Computing with Python - Second Edition
Published in: Jul 2021Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781838822323

Authors (3)

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Claus Führer

Claus Führer is a professor of scientific computations at Lund University, Sweden. He has an extensive teaching record that includes intensive programming courses in numerical analysis and engineering mathematics across various levels in many different countries and teaching environments. Claus also develops numerical software in research collaboration with industry and received Lund University's Faculty of Engineering Best Teacher Award in 2016.
Read more about Claus Führer