Understanding basic mathematical functions

Basic mathematical functions appear in many applications. For example, logarithms can be used to scale data that grows exponentially to give linear data. The exponential function and trigonometric functions are common fixtures when working with geometric information, the gamma function appears in combinatorics, and the Gaussian error function is important in statistics.

The math module in the Python Standard Library provides all of the standard mathematical functions, along with common constants and some utility functions, and it can be imported using the following command:

import math

Once it’s imported, we can use any of the mathematical functions that are contained in this module. For instance, to find the square root of a non-negative number, we would use the sqrt function from math:

import math
math.sqrt(4)  #  2.0

Attempting to use the sqrt function with a negative argument will raise a value...