Exponents are superscript numbers that describe how many times you want to multiply a number by itself. Calculating a value raised to the power of another value is a fundamental operation in applied mathematics such as finance, machine learning, statistics, and data science. This tutorial shows you how to do it in Python! Definition For … Read more
The following is a conversation with an AI assistant. The assistant is helpful, creative, clever, and very friendly. Human: Hello, who are you? AI: I am an AI created by OpenAI. How can I help you today? Human: My name is Chris, and I’d love to teach people to code. AI: I would recommend the … Read more
The reference count is the number of times an object is referenced by a variable. If an object isn’t referenced anymore, it can be safely removed from the memory—what’s the use of an object nobody cares for anyway? This article shows you how to count the number of references to a Python object. What’s the … Read more
Python OS modules allow users to interact with files and directories. There are many functions or methods that Python employs in working with files or directories. However, in this article, we will consider three (3) essential functions. Now, let’s dive straight into it! Python – os.rename() Python OS rename() file method renames a file or … Read more
Challenge: How to find an element in a sorted matrix where row and column values increase monotonically? What is a matrix? A matrix is a table of values consisting of rows and columns. Here, we represent the matrix as a list of integer lists. Hence, we can access matrix values with the indexing and slicing … Read more
This tutorial shows you the meaning of captive user interfaces and why they’re discouraged under the Unix philosophy. I’ve written this as a first chapter draft for my upcoming book “From One to Zero” to appear in 2020 with San Francisco-based publisher NoStarch. What’s a Captive User Interface (CUI)? A captive user interface is a … Read more
The Fibonacci series was discovered by the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci in 1202 and even earlier by Indian mathematicians. The series appears in unexpected areas such as economics, mathematics, art, and nature. Algorithm Sketch In the following, we give a simple algorithm to calculate the Fibonacci numbers. The series starts with the Fibonacci numbers zero … Read more
Python’s exec() function executes the Python code you pass as a string or executable object argument. This is called dynamic execution because, in contrast to normal static Python code, you can generate code and execute it at runtime. This way, you can run programmatically-created Python code. Have you ever wondered about the limits of a … Read more
The Python complex() method returns a complex number object. You can either pass a string argument to convert the string to a complex number, or you provide the real and imaginary parts to create a new complex number from those. This article shows you how to use Python’s built-in complex() constructor. You’ll not only learn … Read more
This tutorial introduces the concept of default arguments in Python. A default argument is a function argument that takes on a default value if you don’t pass an explicit value for when calling the function. For example, the function definition def f(x=0): <body> allows you to call it with or without the optional argument x—valid … Read more
Static methods are special cases of class methods. They’re bound to a class rather than an instance, so they’re independent on any instance’s state. Python’s built-in function staticmethod() prefixes a method definition as an annotation @staticmethod. This annotation transforms a normal instance method into a static method. The difference between static (class) methods and instance … Read more
String slicing is a concept to carve out a substring from a given string. Use slicing notation s[start:stop:step] to access every step-th element starting from index start (included) and ending in index stop (excluded). All three arguments are optional, so you can skip them to use the default values (start=0, stop=len(string), step=1). For example, the … Read more