How to efficiently find the bounding box of a collection of points?

Question

I have several points stored in an array. I need to find bounds of that points ie. the rectangle which bounds all the points. I know how to solve this in plain Python.

I would like to know is there a better way than the naive max, min over the array or built-in method to solve the problem.

points = [[1, 3], [2, 4], [4, 1], [3, 3], [1, 6]]
b = bounds(points) # the function I am looking for
# now b = [[1, 1], [4, 6]]

Answer 1

My approach to getting performance is to push things down to C level whenever possible:

def bounding_box(points):
    x_coordinates, y_coordinates = zip(*points)

    return [(min(x_coordinates), min(y_coordinates)), (max(x_coordinates), max(y_coordinates))]

By my (crude) measure, this runs about 1.5 times faster than @ReblochonMasque's bounding_box_naive(). And is clearly more elegant. ;-)