Pioneer of Matplotlib and Data Visualization
John D. Hunter (August 1, 1968 – August 28, 2012) was an American neurobiologist and the original author of Matplotlib, a widely used plotting library for Python. He was raised in Dyersburg, Tennessee, and graduated from Princeton University in 1990. He earned a Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of Chicago in 2004.
In 2005, he joined TradeLink Securities as a Quantitative Analyst and later became a founding director of the NumFOCUS Foundation.
Hunter developed Matplotlib during his postdoctoral research to visualize electrocorticography (ECoG) data. The open-source library became an essential component of the Python scientific stack, alongside NumPy, SciPy, and IPython.
Matplotlib was famously used for data visualization during the 2008 landing of the Phoenix spacecraft on Mars and to create the first image of a black hole.
John Hunter was diagnosed with malignant colon cancer and passed away on August 28, 2012, due to complications from treatment. His memorial service was held at the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel, where he had also graduated with his Ph.D.
He is survived by his wife, Miriam, and their three daughters: Clara, Ava, and Rahel.
In honor of his contributions, the Python Software Foundation created the Distinguished Service Award as its highest honor and posthumously presented it to Hunter in 2012.