mathicon 1.0.0

Mathematics for AI Utilities

Mathicon

Publication-ready figures for mathematics and machine learning — one import away.

Mathicon is the companion library for the Mathematics for AI book and any technical project that generates chapter figures with Python. It gives you a shared visual language: consistent colors, matrix and vector layouts, reusable icons, and mindmaps driven by JSON — so every diagram in a long manuscript looks like it belongs to the same book.

• Online Reading & Gallery: math4ai.org/mathicon/
• Platforms: Linux x86_64, Python 3.9+ (3.12 recommended). Dependencies: matplotlib, numpy.

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Why Mathicon?

Writing a math or ML book means hundreds of small plotting scripts — one per figure. Without a shared toolkit, colors drift, brace styles diverge, and mindmaps become copy-paste nightmares.

Mathicon fixes that:

• One palette across linear algebra, optimization, probability, and information theory chapters
• Matrix & vector helpers — dashed rows/cols, braces, piercing highlights, affine grids, arrows
• Dozens of built-in icons for mindmaps (SVD, Bellman, KL, Langevin, EM, …)
• JSON mindmaps — declare nodes and edges; render a publication-quality figure from mindmap.json
• Local icon hooks — add a custom shape in one script without forking the library
• save_figure_to_script_dir — output lands next to your script, ready for \includegraphics

Built for authors and educators who care how their PDFs look, not just that the code runs.

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Installation

Install from PyPI (release wheel, Linux x86_64):

pip install mathicon

For local development setup (from source), running unit tests, or building release packages, please refer to the Developer Guide (dev.md).

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What you can build

Area	Examples
Colors	plane_color, point_x_color, normal_vector_color, …
Matrices	Matrix, dashed rows/cols, braces, row/column coloring
Vectors	draw_vec, draw_affine_grid, arrow
Mindmaps	render_mindmap(__file__) + mindmap.json
Icons	QR, LU, SVD, gradient, Bayes, Markov, score field, …
Icon preview	mathicon-icon-gui (Tkinter browser), mathicon-preview-icons (CLI export)
Figures	save_figure_to_script_dir, 2D/3D grid styling, math fonts

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A minute of code

Consistent scatter plot

from mathicon import point_x_color, save_figure_to_script_dir
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.scatter([1, 2, 3], [1, 4, 9], color=point_x_color)
save_figure_to_script_dir("example.png")

Mindmap from JSON

from mathicon import render_mindmap

if __name__ == "__main__":
    render_mindmap(__file__)   # reads mindmap.json beside this script

Custom mindmap icon (local hook)

def draw_my_topic_icon(ax, center_x, center_y, size=0.5):
    ...

Reference "icon": "my_topic" in mindmap.json — no library patch required.

Preview icons (Tkinter GUI)

Browse every built-in icon interactively — search by name, filter by category, view static and animated previews, and export PNG or GIF:

mathicon-icon-gui

Requires a graphical session (X11 or Wayland on Linux; install python3-tk if Tkinter is missing). For headless batch export to ./preview/, use mathicon-preview-icons instead:

mathicon-preview-icons --list
mathicon-preview-icons basis_dim rotation svd --format png

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Who is it for?

• Authors of textbooks and monographs with matplotlib figure pipelines
• Course materials that need repeatable, professional diagrams
• Researchers publishing papers who want book-grade consistency across chapters

Install once, import everywhere your scripts live.