Zhaozhou Li – Astrophysics, galactic dynamics and structure formation

Public codes

• Overview

  • My public repos and gist code snippets
  • Papers that cited my codes: Google Scholar, arXiv

• Galactic dynamics

  • CuspCore2: Modeling the galaxy structural evolution due to feedback [coming soon].
  • empdf: dynamical modeling with data-driven distribution function [coming soon].

• High performance computation

  • cyper: Cython performed inline: compile and run your Cython snippets on the fly.

• Statistics and machine learning

  • robustgp: State-of-the-art robust Gaussian process.
  • ndtest: Multi-dimensional statistical test with python (including the 2D K-S test).

• File IO and data querying

  • fortio: Python IO for Fortran unformatted binary files with variable-length records.
  • nemo_io: Fast previewing and loading NEMO simulation snapshots.
  • h5attr: Load and view hdf5 dataset in an easy way.
  • query_isochrone: Querying PARSEC isochrones in batch.
  • virgo_query.py: Querying simulation data from virgo database.
  • Gaiadr2Search.py: Search sky region among Gaia source catalog files.

• Misc

  • scitextool: Some routines for preparing astronomy paper submissions.

• handy: Personal Python library for statistics, computation, and plotting. Selected examples

  • binstats: Binned statistics of multivariate data
  • CubicSplineExtrap: Cubic spline with linear extrapolation
  • EqualGridInterpolator: Fast interpolator on ND equally spaced grids
  • indexed: Search given elements in a large array
  • simps2d, trapz2d: Simpsons and Trapezoidal integration of 2D array
  • KDTreeH5: Dump KDTree to hdf5 file and load back
  • query_radius_periodic: KDTree query in periodic boxes (before introduced in scipy)
  • mcd_ellipses: Plot minimum covariance ellipses

• Public Gists functions

  • nbcat.py: Display jupyter notebook in terminal.
  • transform_ckdtree.py: Scale/displace a cKDTree object without rebuilding the tree.
  • skopt_Kandasamy2015.py: Bayesian active learning with skopt.
  • scipy_spline_to_gsl.pyx: Convert Scipy spline object to gsl in cython.

Community contribution

• I am an occasional contributor to many open source projects, including Numpy, Scipy, Cython, adstex, sharedmem, gala, isochrones, and more.

• I obtained the Mars 2020 Contributor and Arctic Code Vault Contributor badges for my contribution to Numpy and Scipy.

• I earned 12 Yearling badges on Stack Overflow for my continuous contributions to the programming community, which attracted a total of 3 million person-visits (as of 2025.11).

Other fun projects

• I am a big fan of note taking applications. Here are several side projects.

  • Tomboy to Markdown: Convert Tomboy/Gnote notes to markdown format.
  • Export Leanote: Export and backup notes from Leanote.
  • TiddlyWiki Markdown plugin (JavaScript): A TiddlyWiki Markdown plugin with KaTeX math support (now obsoleted by the official Markdown plugin).

Data

• Milky Way mass profile and satellite kinematics
  Supplementary data tables for arxiv:1912.02086
  The repository includes four table files, including the inferred MW mass profile and its covariance matrix, the original measurements and the posterior kinematics of MW satellite galaxies.