[1] The first version of Notebooks for IPython was released in 2011 by a team including Fernando Pérez, Brian Granger, and Min Ragan-Kelley.

[6] In January 2021, nearly 10 million were available, including notebooks about the first observation of gravitational waves[7] and about the 2019 discovery of a supermassive black hole.

[13] The steering committee of Project Jupyter received the 2017 ACM Software System Award, an annual award that honors people or an organization "for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both".

[8] Jupyter Notebook can colloquially refer to two different concepts, either the user-facing application to edit code and text, or the underlying file format which is interoperable across many implementations.

Jupyter Notebook is built using several open-source libraries, including IPython, ZeroMQ, Tornado, jQuery, Bootstrap, and MathJax.

A Jupyter Notebook application is a browser-based REPL containing an ordered list of input/output cells which can contain code, text (using Github Flavored Markdown), mathematics, plots and rich media.

[17][18] In 2015, a joint $6 million grant from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded work that led to expanded capabilities of the core Jupyter tools, as well as to the creation of JupyterLab.

[23] While JSON is the most common format, it is possible to forgo some features (like storing images and metadata), and save notebooks as markdown documents using extensions like Jupytext.