Similarly the second example each circle has area double the last one which gives an exponential with base 2. The question asked about doubling the width of a circle so in the first picture for each circle (as we move from left to right) it's width is double the previous one so for the area this is an exponential with base 4. Now the apparent size of the markers increases roughly linearly in an intuitive fashion.Īs for the exact meaning of what a 'point' is, it is fairly arbitrary for plotting purposes, you can just scale all of your sizes by a constant until they look reasonable.Įdit: (In response to comment from probably confusing wording on my part. If instead we have # doubling the area of markers Notice how the size increases very quickly. To see this consider the following two examples and the output they produce. Because of the scaling of area as the square of width, doubling the width actually appears to increase the size by more than a factor 2 (in fact it increases it by a factor of 4).

There is a reason, however, that the size of markers is defined in this way. This means, to double the width (or height) of the marker you need to increase s by a factor of 4.

This can be a somewhat confusing way of defining the size but you are basically specifying the area of the marker.

Pyplot scatter marker style