IPython_notebook

The IPython notebook is fairly new and changing rapidly. The version originally installed in the class VM is version 0.10. To get the latest development version, which has some nicer features, do the following:

$ cd
$ git clone https://github.com/ipython/ipython.git
$ cd ipython
$ sudo python setup.py install

Then start the notebook via:

$ ipython notebook --pylab inline

in order to have the plots appear inline. If you leave off this argument, a new window will be opened for each plot.

Read more about the notebook in the documentation

See some cool examples in the IPython notebook viewer.

See also Sage.

Interactive notebooks

IPython 2.0 (released April 1, 2014) includes interactive widgets

See these Tips for installing IPython 2.0 on your own computer.

SageMathCloud does not yet have IPython 2.0 and for various technical reasons will not have it for a while.

SageMathCloud does now have mpld3, which allows zooming in on plots. For a demo, see Lab 13: Tuesday May 13, 2014 or Jake’s blog post on mpld3

In addition to mpld3, Jake Vanderplass has also developed:

• ipywidgets similar to the 2.0 widgets in some ways but persistent also if the “static” notebook is viewed via nbviewer. See Jake’s blog post on ipywidgets.
• JSAnimation for persistent animations. This is used for example for all the animations in the Clawpack galleries. (Clawpack is an open source software package developed by Randy LeVeque and many others for solving hyperbolic partial differential equations.)