August 2012 archive

John Hunter - the author of matplotlib - has died.

August 30, 2012

John Hunter the main author of matplotlib has died of cancer. For those interested, his close friend Fernando gives a bit more details here. John was an long term developer of matplotlib (even continuing while he was working in industry) and a father of three kids. You might consider donating to the John Hunter Memorial Fund.

We had John as invited speaker at one of our NIPS machine learning open source software workshops. He gave quite some entertaining talk featuring some live demo. I recall that he started with a command prompt typing everything (including fetching some live stock-exchange data) in python at some insane speed. Videolectures recorded his lecture. I don't know about others but I basically plotted all the scientific results using matplotlib and python for the last several years.

Rest in peace John - your contributions will be remembered.