[python] plot a circle with pyplot

If you aim to have the "circle" maintain a visual aspect ratio of 1 no matter what the data coordinates are, you could use the scatter() method. http://matplotlib.org/1.3.1/api/pyplot_api.html#matplotlib.pyplot.scatter

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
y = [10, 20, 30, 40, 50]
r = [100, 80, 60, 40, 20] # in points, not data units
fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 1)
ax.scatter(x, y, s=r)
fig.show()

Image is a scatter plot. Five circles along the line y=10x have decreasing radii from bottom left to top right. Although the graph is square-shaped, the y-axis has 10 times the range of the x-axis. Even so, the aspect ratio of the circles is 1 on the screen.