I am trying to convert the following code from Trefethen's Spectral Methods in MATLAB to Python.

% p6.m - variable coefficient wave equation

% Grid, variable coefficient, and initial data:
  N = 128; h = 2*pi/N; x = h*(1:N); t = 0; dt = h/4;
  c = .2 + sin(x-1).^2;
  v = exp(-100*(x-1).^2); vold = exp(-100*(x-.2*dt-1).^2);

% Time-stepping by leap frog formula:
  tmax = 8; tplot = .15; clf, drawnow, set(gcf,'renderer','zbuffer')
  plotgap = round(tplot/dt); dt = tplot/plotgap;
  nplots = round(tmax/tplot);
  data = [v; zeros(nplots,N)]; tdata = t;
  for i = 1:nplots
    for n = 1:plotgap
      t = t+dt;
      v_hat = fft(v);
      w_hat = 1i*[0:N/2-1 0 -N/2+1:-1] .* v_hat;
      w = real(ifft(w_hat)); 
      vnew = vold - 2*dt*c.*w; vold = v; v = vnew;
    end
    data(i+1,:) = v; tdata = [tdata; t];
  end
  waterfall(x,tdata,data), view(10,70), colormap(1e-6*[1 1 1]);
  axis([0 2*pi 0 tmax 0 5]), ylabel t, zlabel u, grid off

For the most part it is going smoothly except for this line of code

data = [v; zeros(nplots,N)]

After reading how to convert between Numpy and Matlab here Link I tried to convert it by doing the following

data = np.array(v,zeros(nplots,N))

but I get this error

data = np.array(v,zeros(nplots,N));
 TypeError: data type not understood

Which I assume is because a numpy array has this structure

numpy.array(object,dtype=none)

I would appreciate any help with converting that line. Thank you in advance!