Matplotlib (portmanteau of MATLAB, plot, and library) is a plotting library for the Python programming language and its numerical mathematics extension NumPy. It provides an object-oriented API for embedding plots into applications using general-purpose GUI toolkits like Tkinter, wxPython, Qt, or GTK. There is also a procedural "pylab" interface based on a state machine (like OpenGL), designed to closely resemble that of MATLAB, though its use is discouraged. SciPy makes use of Matplotlib.
Matplotlib was originally written by John D. Hunter. Since then it has had an active development community and is distributed under a BSD-style license. Michael Droettboom was nominated as matplotlib's lead developer shortly before John Hunter's death in August 2012 and was further joined by Thomas Caswell. Matplotlib is a NumFOCUS fiscally sponsored project.