A sad day for our community. John Hunter: 1968-2012.
Dear friends and colleagues,
I am terribly saddened to report that yesterday, August 28 2012 at
10am, John D. Hunter died from complications arising from cancer
treatment at the University of Chicago hospital, after a brief but
intense battle with this terrible illness. John is survived by his
wife Miriam, his three daughters Rahel, Ava and Clara, his sisters
Layne and Mary, and his mother Sarah.
Note: If you decide not to read any further (I know this is a long
message), please go to this page for some important information about
how you can thank John for everything he gave in a decade of generous
contributions to the Python and scientific communities:
http://numfocus.org/johnhunter.
Just a few weeks ago, John delivered his keynote address at the SciPy
2012 conference in Austin centered around the evolution of matplotlib:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3lTby5RI54
but tragically, shortly after his return home he was diagnosed with
advanced colon cancer. This diagnosis was a terrible discovery to us
all, but John took it with his usual combination of calm and resolve,
and initiated treatment procedures. Unfortunately, the first round of
chemotherapy treatments led to severe complications that sent him to
the intensive care unit, and despite the best efforts of the
University of Chicago medical center staff, he never fully recovered
from these. Yesterday morning, he died peacefully at the hospital
with his loved ones at his bedside. John fought with grace and
courage, enduring every necessary procedure with a smile on his face
and a kind word for all of his caretakers and becoming a loved patient
of the many teams that ended up involved with his case. This was no
surprise for those of us who knew him, but he clearly left a deep and
lasting mark even amongst staff hardened by the rigors of oncology
floors and intensive care units.
I don't need to explain to this community the impact of John's work,
but allow me to briefly recap, in case this is read by some who don't
know the whole story. In 2002, John was a postdoc at the University
of Chicago hospital working on the analysis of epilepsy seizure data
in children. Frustrated with the state of the existing proprietary
solutions for this class of problems, he started using Python for his
work, back when the scientific Python ecosystem was much, much smaller
than it is today and this could have been seen as a crazy risk.
Furthermore, he found that there were many half-baked solutions for
data visualization in Python at the time, but none that truly met his
needs. Undeterred, he went on to create matplotlib
(http://matplotlib.org) and thus overcome one of the key obstacles for
Python to become the best solution for open source scientific and
technical computing. Matplotlib is both an amazing technical
achievement and a shining example of open source community building,
as John not only created its backbone but also fostered the
development of a very strong development team, ensuring that the
talent of many others could also contribute to this project. The
value and importance of this are now painfully clear: despite having
lost John, matplotlib continues to thrive thanks to the leadership of
Michael Droetboom, the support of Perry Greenfield at the Hubble
Telescope Science Institute, and the daily work of the rest of the
team. I want to thank Perry and Michael for putting their resources
and talent once more behind matplotlib, securing the future of the
project.
It is difficult to overstate the value and importance of matplotlib,
and therefore of John's contributions (which do not end in matplotlib,
by the way; but a biography will have to wait for another day...).
Python has become a major force in the technical and scientific
computing world, leading the open source offers and challenging
expensive proprietary platforms with large teams and millions of
dollars of resources behind them. But this would be impossible without
a solid data visualization tool that would allow both ad-hoc data
exploration and the production of complex, fine-tuned figures for
papers, reports or websites. John had the vision to make matplotlib
easy to use, but powerful and flexible enough to work in graphical
user interfaces and as a server-side library, enabling a myriad use
cases beyond his personal needs. This means that now, matplotlib
powers everything from plots in dissertations and journal articles to
custom data analysis projects and websites. And despite having left
his academic career a few years ago for a job in industry, he remained
engaged enough that as of today, he is still the top committer to
matplotlib; this is the git shortlog of those with more than 1000
commits to the project:
2145 John Hunter
participants (1)
-
Fernando Perez