As per the bug report on ubuntuforums.org (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2326008)
There is also an issue open on github for this: https://github.com/pyFFTW/pyFFTW/issues/112 Are you able to give more information on this. Does the relevant FFTW lib file exist - probably something like: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfftw3l_threads.so.3.4.4 If so, is the fftwl_plan_with_nthreads symbol shown with: nm -D /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfftw3l_threads.so.3.4.4 Finally, if those both look fine, what does the following report: ldd /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pyfftw/pyfftw.x86_64-linux-gnu.so (specifically, the reference to libfftw3l_threads.so)