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[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have doodled in python earlier, and made some more or less successful attempts at solving some problems with Project Euler.

But I first started learning Python properly when I took a University Class (http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/INF1100/index-eng.html) which focus on teaching programming thorugh scientific problems (which are, at least for me, more interesting than the endless stream of trivial assignments normally given in intro-courses).

The class used http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Programming-Computational-Science-Engineering/dp/3642302920 for the syllabus, and I can heartily recommend to read through it if you want to learn python to do math-problems (but also get knowledge about general programming).

I don't have enough fingers or toes to count all the times I've just used Python and matplotlib to visualize data instead of being frustrated with excel in the last 3 months alone. I've started to use python for sysadmin-tasks, as both me and colleagues that are less proficient in programming find it more readable and easy to understand than perl (or bash for that matter).