Python indexing starts at 0 (rather than 1), so your assignment "r[1,:] = r0" defines the second (i.e. index 1) element of r and leaves the first (index 0) element as a pair of zeros. The first value of i in your for loop is 0, so rr gets the square root of the dot product of the first entry in r with itself (which is 0), and the division by rr in the subsequent line throws the error.