Where are the math functions?

Tim Rowe digitig at cix.co.uk
Wed Jun 14 17:32:00 EDT 2000


In article <owen-97F32C.10015712062000 at news.u.washington.edu>, 
owen at astro.washington.edu (Russell E. Owen) wrote:

> In article <slrn8k8dfv.tu.hzhu at mars.localdomain>, 
> hzhu at users.sourceforge.net wrote:
> 
> >I'm quite puzzled by not being able to find most of the common special
> >functions, such as (incomplete) gamma, beta and bessel and erf.
> >
> >This arrises from effort to provide statistical functions for the MatPy
> >package.  Many stat functions require incomplete gamma/beta and some
> >variants.
> >...
> 
> The random module (which is available on all platforms) offers beta and 
> gamma functions. I can't comment on incomplete gamma, bessel and erf. I 
> found the information about the random module in "Python Essential 
> Reference" by David Beazley; the index lists beta and gamma, but not 
> the others.

No it doesn't. It includes the beta and gamma /distributions/. These are 
related to, but not the same as, the beta and gamma /functions/.

When I wanted the gamma function I just ported code from Numerical Recipes 
in C, which only took a couple of minutes (longer to test, but I'd have 
spent that time if I'd just typed in the C). Probably still be a copyright 
violation to post it, though :-(



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