Scientific Computing with Python 3

Basic types

Let's go over the basic data types that you will encounter in Python.

Numbers

A number may be an integer, a real number, or a complex number. The usual operations are:

• addition and subtraction, + and -
• multiplication and division, * and /
• power, **

Here is an example:

2 ** (2 + 2) # 16
1j ** 2 # -1
1. + 3.0j

Note

The symbol for complex numbers

j  is a symbol to denote the imaginary part of a complex number. It is a syntactic element and should not be confused with multiplication by a variable. More on complex numbers can be found in section Numeric Types of Chapter 2, Variables and Basic Types.

Strings

Strings are sequences of characters, enclosed by simple or double quotes:

'valid string' "string with double quotes" "you shouldn't forget comments" ...