At university in the "signal processing" lecture, I solved all exercises in Python while most students used MatLab (which was recommended by the lecturer). I just did it because I like Python, and expected my solutions to be clumsier and more "lowlevel". But when we compared our programs, I was surprised that MatLab didn't offer any more useful building blocks (libraries/functions) than Python, at least for our tasks at hand. And the Python code was quite clear, but that's probably a matter of taste.
If it's about programming and math, Python really plays its strengths: Clean syntax, functional programming features, numpy, sympy, linalg, etc.
