Original ticket http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/ticket/1193 on 2009-08-12 by @kwgoodman, assigned to unknown.

Using a trick that Robert Kern recently posted to the numpy list makes the identity function much faster.

Current version:

def identity(n, dtype=None):
a = array([1]+n*[0],dtype=dtype)
b = empty((n,n),dtype=dtype)
b.flat = a
return b

Proposed version:

def myidentity(n, dtype=None):
a = zeros((n,n), dtype=dtype)
a.flat[::n+1] = 1
return a

timeit identity(1)
100000 loops, best of 3: 14.9 µs per loop
timeit identity(10)
10000 loops, best of 3: 20 µs per loop
timeit identity(100)
1000 loops, best of 3: 696 µs per loop
timeit identity(1000)
10 loops, best of 3: 73.6 ms per loop

timeit myidentity(1)
100000 loops, best of 3: 6.57 µs per loop
timeit myidentity(10)
100000 loops, best of 3: 7.08 µs per loop
timeit myidentity(100)
100000 loops, best of 3: 16.4 µs per loop
timeit myidentity(1000)
100 loops, best of 3: 5.92 ms per loop

It would also speed up the functions that use identity (for example np.linalg.inv).