Finding the smallest number in a list can be simple with Python.

Finding the smallest number in a list in python is often required for many tasks like finding outliers, identifying min and max values etc. Here’s how you do it. …

Finding the smallest number in a list in python is often required for many tasks like finding outliers, identifying min and max values etc. Here’s how you do it.

# Initializing a sample list of numbers
numbers = [45, 67, 23, 10, 89, 64, 98, 5]

# Using the min() function to find out the smallest number in the list
smallest_number = min(numbers)
print("The smallest number is:", smallest_number)

This code snippet initializes a list of numbers and then applies the min() function to find the smallest number. This function returns the smallest value in an iterable or raises ValueError if given an empty iterable. The result is printed on the screen.

In the context of this problem, ‘outliers’ refers to data points that are distant from the majority and can distort the results. For example, if we have a list [1,2,3,4,5] and suddenly include 999 into it, the min function will still correctly return 1 as the smallest number, but this ‘outlier’ value might not be what we expect in some contexts.

The min() function can also be used to find out the minimum and maximum values in a list by passing multiple parameters:

print("Minimum Value is :", min(numbers))
print("Maximum Value is :", max(numbers))