Jake VanderPlas

Open-source work

VanderPlas is one of the authors named in the JAX repository's citation entry and has written several of the project's design proposals. These cover JAX's type promotion semantics, the scope of its NumPy and SciPy wrappers and stateful randomness, and VanderPlas co-wrote the typed PRNG keys proposal with Roy Frostig.¹²³⁴⁵

The project list in VanderPlas's website repository describes earlier contributions to scikit-learn, mainly in generalized N-point problems and manifold learning, and to SciPy's sparse matrix toolkit, including iterative sparse decompositions and graph algorithms. It also lists Altair, a declarative visualization library for Python built on the Vega ecosystem, and AstroML, a machine learning package for astronomy written to accompany a textbook.⁷

Teaching and writing

VanderPlas, an astronomer by training, wrote the Python Data Science Handbook and the free e-book A Whirlwind Tour of Python, both published by O'Reilly Media in 2016 and readable online. With Željko Ivezić, Andrew Connolly and Alexander Gray, VanderPlas co-wrote Statistics, Data Mining, and Machine Learning in Astronomy, published by Princeton University Press in 2014.⁸

VanderPlas also writes the blog Pythonic Perambulations, whose posts include a 2018 explanation of the waiting time paradox, and several examples in the Python Data Science Handbook are drawn from its posts.⁸⁹

Work and contributions

• JAX Open-source code

  Named in the "Citing JAX" author list; author of JAX design documents on type promotion, the scope of jax.numpy and jax.scipy (JEP 18137), and stateful randomness (JEP 28845), and co-author of JEP 9263 on typed keys. The repository is released under the Apache License 2.0.^1234510

Timeline

1. 2014Co-wrote the textbook Statistics, Data Mining, and Machine Learning in Astronomy.⁸
2. 2016Published the Python Data Science Handbook and A Whirlwind Tour of Python with O'Reilly Media.⁸
3. Dec 2021Wrote the JAX design proposal on type promotion semantics.²
4. Oct 2023Wrote the JAX design proposal on the scope of its NumPy and SciPy wrappers.³
5. Nov 2025Wrote the JAX design proposal on stateful randomness.⁴

Where they work

• Google 121 people in the wiki

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