This is an example of ploting with matplotlib.pyplot

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt


labels = ['G1', 'G2', 'G3', 'G4', 'G5']
men_means = [20, 35, 30, 35, 27]
women_means = [25, 32, 34, 20, 25]
men_std = [1, 3, 4, 1, 2]
women_std = [3, 5, 2, 3, 3]
width = 0.35       # the width of the bars: can also be len(x) sequence

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

ax.bar(labels, men_means, width, yerr=men_std, label='Men')
ax.bar(labels, women_means, width, yerr=women_std, bottom=men_means,
       label='Women')

ax.set_ylabel('Scores')
ax.set_title('Scores by group and gender')
ax.legend()

plt.show()

For useful examples, visit https://matplotlib.org/2.0.2/examples/index.html

Following is showing on to plot some mathematical functions.

# Plot y=x^2 
import numpy as np
x = np.linspace (0,2,100)
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot (x,x**2)
ax.set_xlabel("x")
ax.set_ylabel("y=x^2")
plt.show()

Following is showing how to plot some data created by ourselves

This example is used to show how to read regular data files and plot data in jupty notebook The key is that you need to import pandas as pd to read text files. Visit this website for more info http://awesci.com/reading-and-plotting-data-in-jupyter-notebook/ pd.read_csv function should be familiar, arguments as header=None, skiprows=1, you may use that.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
filename ='data_file/Au_15nm_20nm_MieNF_JC.dat'
data=pd.read_csv(filename,sep='\t',skiprows=1,header=None).values
data.shape

(601, 3)

lamda = data[:,0]
qext1_15nm = data[:,1]
qext2_20nm = data[:,2]
plt.plot(lamda, qext2_20nm,"r-")
plt.plot(lamda,qext1_15nm,"b-")
ax.set_xlabel("lamda")
ax.set_ylabel("Qext")
plt.show()