Jupyter Notebooks are a web-based interactive computing platform that allows users to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, narrative text, visualizations, and more. They were originally named IPython Notebook and later renamed Jupyter. Jupyter supports over 40 programming languages, including Python, R, Julia, and Scala.

Jupyter Notebooks consist of two main components: the Notebook document and the Jupyter Notebook App. The Notebook document is a human-readable document that contains both computer code and rich text elements such as paragraphs, equations, figures, and links. It is both a document containing the analysis description and the results as well as an executable document that can be run to perform data analysis. The Jupyter Notebook App is a server-client application that allows editing and running notebook documents via a web browser. It can be executed on a local desktop or installed on a remote server and accessed through the internet.

Jupyter Notebooks are used for a variety of purposes, including data exploration, machine learning experimentations and modeling, and documenting code samples. They have independent executable code cells that users can run in any order, and documentation can be done by alternating between code and markdown cells. JupyterLab is the latest web-based interactive development environment for notebooks, code, and data, and it allows users to configure and arrange workflows in data science, scientific computing, computational journalism, and machine learning.