I'd recommend Sage. It is a math-oriented Python environment that includes many of the popular open source math packages. It also has a worksheet mode that lets

I'd recommend Sage. It is a math-oriented Python environment that includes many of the popular open source math packages. It also has a worksheet mode that lets you save an interactive session, which is something R can do but not python. In fact, Sage includes R so if you really want to you can use R functions from within python (unfortunately, it's a little messy). http://www.sagemath.org/ http://www.sagemath.org/