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Add new case studies highlighting contributions to recent scientific discoveries #913

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@InessaPawson

It would be great to expand the NumPy case studies with examples showing NumPy's role in some of the major scientific advances of the 2020s.

Potential case studies:

  • JWST – detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet atmosphere (WASP-39 b
    NumPy was used in the extraction, reduction, and analysis of JWST observations leading to the detection.
    References: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05269-w

  • NANOGrav – evidence for a nanohertz gravitational-wave background
    NumPy is part of the scientific Python stack used to analyze pulsar timing data and search for the gravitational-wave signal.
    References: https://authors.library.caltech.edu/records/mrtaw-spj56)

  • FlyWire – complete adult fruit-fly brain connectome
    NumPy was used in analyses of a connectome containing more than 139,000 neurons and tens of millions of synapses.
    References: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07968-y

  • AlphaFold – protein structure prediction
    AlphaFold uses NumPy within its data processing and inference stack. This could illustrate how NumPy supports modern computational biology and AI-driven scientific discovery.
    References: https://github.com/google-deepmind/alphafold/tree/main

  • Event Horizon Telescope – Sagittarius A*
    NumPy is used throughout EHT imaging software involved in reconstructing the first image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. This could serve as a follow-up to the existing M87 black-hole case study.
    References: https://github.com/eventhorizontelescope/2022-D02-02

Suggested next steps for each candidate:

  • Identify and connect with members of the research team who could provide quotes about NumPy’s role in the research and/or discovery.
  • Write a case study for numpy.org of ~7,000 characters.

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