About the Author

Duncan M. McGreggor, having programmed with GOTOs in the 1980s, has made up for that through community service by making open source contributions for more than 20 years. He has spent a major part of the past 10 years dealing with distributed and scientific computing (in languages ranging from Python, Common Lisp, and Julia to Clojure and Lisp Flavored Erlang). In the 1990s, after serving as a linguist in the US Army, he spent considerable time working on projects related to MATLAB and Mathematica, which was a part of his physics and maths studies at the university. Since the mid 2000s, matplotlib and NumPy have figured prominently in many of the interesting problems that he has solved for his customers. With the most recent addition of the IPython Notebook, matplotlib and the suite of the Python scientific computing libraries remain some of his most important professional tools.