I am coding with Pythons NumPy module. If coordinates of a point in 3D space are described as [1, 2, 1], wouldn't that be three dimensions, three axis, a rank of three? Or if that is one dimension then shouldn't it be points (plural), not point?
Here is the documentation:
In Numpy dimensions are called axes. The number of axes is rank. For example, the coordinates of a point in 3D space [1, 2, 1] is an array of rank 1, because it has one axis. That axis has a length of 3.
In numpy arrays, dimensionality refers to the number of axes needed to index it, not the dimensionality of any geometrical space. For example, you can describe the locations of points in 3D space with a 2D array:
array([[0, 0, 0], [1, 2, 3], [2, 2, 2], [9, 9, 9]]) Which has shape of (4, 3) and dimension 2. But it can describe 3D space because the length of each row (axis 1) is three, so each row can be the x, y, and z component of a point's location. The length of axis 0 indicates the number of points (here, 4). However, that is more of an application to the math that the code is describing, not an attribute of the array itself. In mathematics, the dimension of a vector would be its length (e.g., x, y, and z components of a 3d vector), but in numpy, any "vector" is really just considered a 1d array of varying length. The array doesn't care what the dimension of the space (if any) being described is.
You can play around with this, and see the number of dimensions and shape of an array like so:
In [262]: a = np.arange(9) In [263]: a Out[263]: array([0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]) In [264]: a.ndim # number of dimensions Out[264]: 1 In [265]: a.shape Out[265]: (9,) In [266]: b = np.array([[0,0,0],[1,2,3],[2,2,2],[9,9,9]]) In [267]: b Out[267]: array([[0, 0, 0], [1, 2, 3], [2, 2, 2], [9, 9, 9]]) In [268]: b.ndim Out[268]: 2 In [269]: b.shape Out[269]: (4, 3) Arrays can have many dimensions, but they become hard to visualize above two or three:
In [276]: c = np.random.rand(2,2,3,4) In [277]: c Out[277]: array([[[[ 0.33018579, 0.98074944, 0.25744133, 0.62154557], [ 0.70959511, 0.01784769, 0.01955593, 0.30062579], [ 0.83634557, 0.94636324, 0.88823617, 0.8997527 ]], [[ 0.4020885 , 0.94229555, 0.309992 , 0.7237458 ], [ 0.45036185, 0.51943908, 0.23432001, 0.05226692], [ 0.03170345, 0.91317231, 0.11720796, 0.31895275]]], [[[ 0.47801989, 0.02922993, 0.12118226, 0.94488471], [ 0.65439109, 0.77199972, 0.67024853, 0.27761443], [ 0.31602327, 0.42678546, 0.98878701, 0.46164756]], [[ 0.31585844, 0.80167337, 0.17401188, 0.61161196], [ 0.74908902, 0.45300247, 0.68023488, 0.79672751], [ 0.23597218, 0.78416727, 0.56036792, 0.55973686]]]]) In [278]: c.ndim Out[278]: 4 In [279]: c.shape Out[279]: (2, 2, 3, 4) It is of rank one, as you need one index to index it. That one axis has the length 3, as the index indexing it can take three different values: v[i], i=0..2.
Just paste part of answer from this answer:
In Numpy, dimension, axis/axes, shape are related and sometimes similar concepts:
In [1]: import numpy as np In [2]: a = np.array([[1,2],[3,4]]) In Mathematics/Physics, dimension or dimensionality is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within a space. But in Numpy, according to the numpy doc, it's the same as axis/axes:
In Numpy dimensions are called axes. The number of axes is rank.
In [3]: a.ndim # num of dimensions/axes, *Mathematics definition of dimension* Out[3]: 2 the nth coordinate to index an array in Numpy. And multidimensional arrays can have one index per axis.
In [4]: a[1,0] # to index `a`, we specific 1 at the first axis and 0 at the second axis. Out[4]: 3 # which results in 3 (locate at the row 1 and column 0, 0-based index) describes how many data along each available axis.
In [5]: a.shape Out[5]: (2, 2) # both the first and second axis have 2 (columns/rows/pages/blocks/...) data You can also use axis parameter in group operations, in case of axis=0 Numpy performs the action on elements of each column, and if axis=1, it performs the action on rows.
test = np.arange(0,9).reshape(3,3) Out[3]: array([[0, 1, 2], [3, 4, 5], [6, 7, 8]]) test.sum(axis=0) Out[5]: array([ 9, 12, 15]) test.sum(axis=1) Out[6]: array([ 3, 12, 21])