This document provides an overview of effective numerical computation in NumPy and SciPy. It discusses how Python can be used for numerical computation tasks like differential equations, simulations, and machine learning. While Python is initially slower than languages like C, libraries like NumPy and SciPy allow Python code to achieve sufficient speed through techniques like broadcasting, indexing, and using sparse matrix representations. The document provides examples of how to efficiently perform tasks like applying functions element-wise to sparse matrices and calculating norms. It also presents a case study for efficiently computing a formula that appears in a machine learning paper using different sparse matrix representations in SciPy.