The future of R - pessimistic thoughts by R founder Ross Ihaka 16 years ago
Is there any chance that SciPy was compiled without the ATLAS/BLAS/LAPACK libraries? (You can verify this using with the "numpy.show_config()" and "scipy.show_config()" functions in an interactive python session.) In that case, all the numerical math would be done in straight Python rather than optimized C/FORTRAN.