Plotting Mathematical Functions in Ruby, Inside Jupyter
March 13, 2026
ruby-libgd: Scientific Plotting Comes to Ruby
The Envy We Never Talked About
Anyone who has spent serious time with Ruby and then watched a Python developer type plt.show() to produce a beautiful Matplotlib graph in a Jupyter notebook knows the feeling. It is not quite jealousy — Ruby is still the most expressive language most of us have ever touched — but it is a quiet recognition that Python had something we did not.
I came to Ruby after years in PHP, C, and C++. I dedicated myself to mastering it, and I never regretted that decision. Ruby’s syntax turns ideas into algorithms with a naturalness that no other language I know has matched. But scientific visualization? That was always Python’s unfair advantage.
Today, on a Friday afternoon, I want to share something that closes that gap: a Docker container running JupyterLab with a full Ruby kernel, backed by ruby-libgd, plotting Sin, Cos, Log, and arbitrary mathematical functions entirely in Ruby. No Python. No wrappers. Just Ruby.
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Plotting Mathematical Functions in Ruby, Inside Jupyter March 13, 2026 ruby-libgd: Scientific Plotting Comes to Ruby The Envy We Never Talked About Anyone who has spent serious time with Ruby and t…
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