Mathematical functions

Abstract

Functions allow programming code reuse, and thus are essential in any programming language. We have discussed earlier in Sect. 2.10 how to define general-purpose functions in the Python programming language. But this book is about numerical and statistical computations, therefore, we will turn to the question of how to build mathematical functions. In this chapter, we will remind how to construct mathematical functions in Python and then we will discuss how to extend this approach to call Java-implemented mathematical functions using Jython. The latter topic describes the flagship concept of numerical computations used in this book. In addition to simplicity, this approach also allows easy transformation of code examples into Java programs or other scripting languages, such as Groovy and JRuby, which can directly access Java numeric libraries.