Speeding up Python

[TToommLL]

I read that Industrial Light And Magic is using Python, but I don't see how
that is possible.  I need to do some heavy floating point and math.sin() number
crunching  but find that Python takes 40 times as long as C++.  I tried JPython
thinking that it would gain the speed of the JIT but it's about 30 times as
long as using Java.  I wonder if I'm missing something.  Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Tom