This Stackoverflow question brings the confusing matrix dimensions used in the imshow documentation to our attention.

According to the docstring one may use arrays of shapes (n, m) etc. which are then named MxN.

However, according to wikipedia

A matrix with m rows and n columns is called an m × n matrix or m-by-n matrix.

This is also the convention used by numpy, e.g. the arrays.ndarray.html speaks about

A 2-dimensional array of size 2 x 3, composed of 4-byte integer elements:
x = np.array([[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]], np.int32)

The documentation should therefore either speak of

• shape (n, m), or n x m array (nxm looks strange)
• shape (N, M) or NxM array
• shape (m, n) or m x n array
• shape (M, N) or M x N array

Now, which is better? All capitalized or not, n or m being rows?