This one took me a while figure out…

For some reason once I am working with plots that involve calculus, R doesn’t feel right. Part of me might prefer Mathematica for tasks like this but, alas, it is quite out of my price range and the only way I know to access it at uni is through the computing cluster. So I’m using matplotlib as an alternative to R for more math-y type plotting.

I have a new machine on my desk so I’m starting with a clean slate. I don’t know the ins and outs of building python and MacPorts did drive me to drink, so here it is with homebrew

The only dependency outside of python-land is a FORTRAN compiler. The step that I really got tripped up on is that pip will by default attempt to install an older version of matplotlib that breaks with the latest numpy (it installs fine, though).