py4est wraps the p4est functionality for static and dynamic AMR in Python. Currently some important C structs are wrapped with ctypes. The code relies on the following assumptions about p4est_base.h. typedef int32_t p4est_qcoord_t; typedef int32_t p4est_topidx_t; typedef int32_t p4est_locidx_t; typedef int64_t p4est_gloidx_t; Their python counterparts are defined at the beginning of py4est.py and they need to be changed whenever the p4est typedefs change. The p4est core algorithms are documented in Carsten Burstedde, Lucas C. Wilcox, and Omar Ghattas: "p4est: Scalable Algorithms for Parallel Adaptive Mesh Refinement on Forests of Octrees," SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing 33 No. 3 (2011), pages 1103-1133. The AMR pipeline and the interaction between the mesh and the fields that is behind the conventions in the py4est module are documented in Carsten Burstedde, Omar Ghattas, Georg Stadler, Tiankai Tu, and Lucas C. Wilcox: "Towards Adaptive Mesh PDE Simulations on Petascale Computers," Proceedings of Teragrid '08. If this library turns out useful, we would be grateful for these citations.