concept contour map in category python

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Math for Programmers: 3D graphics, machine learning, and simulations with Python MEAP V11. Login to get full access to this book.

We’ll write potential energy as a function, taking a point (x, y) and returning a single number, representing the gravitational potential energy at the point (x, y). In terms of the bowl analogy, this is something like the height of the bowl at a given point. Once we implement a potential energy function in Python, we can visualize it in three ways: as a heatmap, which you saw at the beginning of this chapter, as a 3D graph, and as a contour map as shown in figure 11.16.

Figure 11.16: Three pictures of a scalar field: a heatmap, a graph, and a contour map