How do I approximate the Jacobian and Hessian of a function numerically?

Question

I have a function in Python:

def f(x):
    return x[0]**3 + x[1]**2 + 7 
    # Actually more than this.
    # No analytical expression

It\'s a

Answer 1

Restricted to just SciPy, the most convenient way I found was scipy.misc.derivative, within the appropriate loops, with lambdas to curry the function of interest.