John took this as a cue to set out on his own, and the Matplotlib package was born, with version 0.1 released in 2003.
IPython’s creator, Fernando Perez, was at the time scrambling to finish his PhD, and let John know he wouldn’t have time to review the patch for several months. It was conceived by John Hunter in 2002, originally as a patch to IPython for enabling interactive MATLAB-style plotting via gnuplot from the IPython command line. Matplotlib is a multiplatform data visualization library built on NumPy arrays, and designed to work with the broader SciPy stack. We’ll now take an in-depth look at the Matplotlib tool for visualization in Python.
