Travis Oliphant

Travis Oliphant is an American data scientist and businessman. He is a co-founder of NumFOCUS, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity in the United States, and sits on its advisory board. He is also a founder of technology startup Anaconda. In addition, Oliphant is the primary creator of NumPy and founding contributor to the SciPy packages in the Python programming language.

Oliphant has a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Mayo Clinic and B.S. and M.S. degrees in mathematics and electrical engineering from Brigham Young University.

Oliphant was an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Brigham Young University from 2001 to 2007. In addition, he directed the university's Biomedical Imaging Lab, and did research on scanning impedance imaging.

He was president of Enthought from 2007 until 2011. He founded Continuum Analytics in January 2012 (renamed Anaconda Inc. in 2017) and was chief executive until 2017. Continuum makes the Python distribution platform Anaconda. In July 2015 Continuum received $24 million in series A funding. Continuum received $100,000 from DARPA to design a high-level, data-parallel language extension to Python on graphics processing units (GPUs). On April 1, 2017, Oliphant announced he was leaving Anaconda. He co-founded Quansight later that year.

He is also a member of the advisory council of the non-profit scientific computing foundation NumFOCUS.

In February 2025, Oliphant was a founding director of the Open Source AI Foundation (O-SAIF) with Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser and former Wyoming legislator Tyler Lindholm.

Oliphant is the author of the textbook Guide To NumPy and associated manuals.

• Travis E. Oliphant (2007). "Python for Scientific Computing". Computing in Science & Engineering. 9 (3): 10–20. doi:10.1109/MCSE.2007.58. ISSN 1521-9615. Wikidata Q62058750.
• Pauli Virtanen; Ralf Gommers; Travis E. Oliphant; et al. (23 July 2019). "SciPy 1.0: fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python" (PDF). Nature Methods. 17 (3): 261–272. arXiv:1907.10121. doi:10.1038/S41592-019-0686-2. ISSN 1548-7091. PMC 7056644. PMID 32015543. Wikidata Q84573952. (erratum)
• Charles R Harris; K. Jarrod Millman; Stéfan J. van der Walt; et al. (16 September 2020). "Array programming with NumPy" (PDF). Nature. 585 (7825): 357–362. arXiv:2006.10256. doi:10.1038/S41586-020-2649-2. ISSN 1476-4687. PMC 7759461. PMID 32939066. Wikidata Q99413970.

• Travis Oliphant publications indexed by Google Scholar