This man is indirectly responsible for Python becoming the lingua-franca of data science. Without Scipy/numpy wrapping his libraries, Python would not have achieved the success it has today.
Actually, all of the scripting languages developed packed arrays and BLAS bindings around the same time -- Python with numpy, Ruby with narray, Perl with PDL, and I think Common Lisp and some of the Schemes did, too. Python won that race for other reasons, I think mostly because its syntax looked pretty.
I'm not so sure that the underlying libraries has much to do with it compared to the well designed interfaces of Scipy/Numpy and Python's expressive syntax / batteries-included standard library.
It's a two-way street. 100% agree that python lent itself to being a great wrapper language - but there has to be something valuable to wrap for python to be useful.
