Your first plot

Matplotlib contains a module called pyplot which enavbles MATLAB style plotting and customisation. We will be using this throughout this mini-course. Now, in a new terminal type the following:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

If you have never imported a module before, take a look here. Something slightly different about the above command is the addition of as plt - all this does is enables you to access everything in matplotlib.pyplot by just typing plt i.e. instead of typing matplotlib.pyplot.function each time, all we have to now type is plt.function which is both quicker and tidier (which makes for easier reading).

Let’s start by creating some new data which we’ll do using numpy (see here if you haven’t used numpy before) - in a new terminal, type the following:

import numpy as np
data=np.array((np.arange(0,10,1), np.arange(0,30,3)))

A basic line plot

To create a line plot, we will use matplotlib’s plot() function (remember you can find out how to use it by typing plt.plot?). We need to pass in our data - type the following to create the basic line plot:

plt.plot(data[0,:],data[1,:])
plt.show()