ANN: SciPy 0.3 Released

[Travis N. Vaught]

Greetings,

SciPy 0.3 has been released and binaries are available from the 
scipy.org site.

http://www.scipy.org

Changes since the 0.1 version (0.1 enjoyed a wide release, there was a 
version 0.2 that had limited exposure) include the following:

 - general improvements: Added utility functions for constructing arrays 
by concatenation, intended mainly for command-line use. Added bmat 
constructor for easy creation of block matrices. Added mat constructor 
for constructing matrices (where * is matrix multiplication). Added many 
PIL utility functions so that if the PIL is installed, image loading, 
saving, and other operations are available. Added scipy.info, which 
handles dynamic docstrings and class help better than python's help command.

 - documentation: much improved

 - sparse: superLU upgraded to 3.0

 - optimize: Added non-linear conjugate gradient algorithm. Improvements 
to BFGS algorithm and Wolfe-condition line-search. Added two CONSTRAINED 
optimization techniques. Added simulated annealing and brute-force 
optimization strategies and Powell's method. Added many very good 1-D 
root-finding routines.

 - stats: Added many statistical distributions. Many continuous and 
discrete random variables are available with a simple mechanism for 
adding new ones. Added several statistical tests.

 - special: Added MANY new special functions. |general_function| renamed 
to |vectorize| and moved to scipy_base. Improved the way domain errors 
are handled (user specified display of problems). More tests on special 
functions added.

 - fftpack: replaced with fftpack2--can optionally be configured to 
support djbfft

 - io: Reading of MATLAB .mat files (version 4 and 5) supported. Writing 
version 4 .mat files supported. Added very flexible and general_purpose 
text file reader. Added shelving save operation to save variables into 
an importable module. Routines for reading and writing fortran-records.

 - linalg: Linear algebra is greatly improved over SciPy 0.1. ATLAS is 
now optional (but encouraged). Most lapack functions have simplified 
interfaces (all lapack and blas available). Matrix exponentials and 
other matrix functions added.

 - signal: Added support for filter design and LTI system analysis.

 - xplt: Updated xplt to use newer pygist so that Windows platform is 
supported. Addition of several plotting types.

 - integrate: added another ODE integrator. Added romberg integration 
and several other integration approaches.


The complete release notes can be found here:

http://www.scipy.org/download/scipy_release_notes_0.3.html


You'll also notice that scipy.org is now a spanking new Plone portal 
(http://www.plone.org -- keep up the good work, plone folks).

This is the first binary release in a long time and we hope to increase 
the frequency to every 6 months or so.

If you'd like to follow or join the community, you can subscribe to the 
mailing lists here:

http://www.scipy.org/mailinglists/

Best Regards,

Travis


BTW SciPy is:
-------------
SciPy is an open source library of scientific tools for Python. SciPy 
supplements the popular Numeric module, gathering a variety of high 
level science and engineering modules together as a single package.

SciPy includes modules for graphics and plotting, optimization, 
integration, special functions, signal and image processing, genetic 
algorithms, ODE solvers, and others.