help/advice needed

Hi all,

I am trying to develop an application with flash, however I need some expert advice:

Flash will be a client serving data from a MySQL database. But that's not all... The data (3d image in ASCII mode) will have to be presented dynamically, with features such as zoom in/out, rotation, as well as other fancy additions.

Moreover, the middleware between MySQL and Flash will be either PHP or Python.

I need suggestion on which middleware to use: PHP or Python? PHP has good support but doesn't have any math libraries that I could find. Python on the other hand has good Math libraries.

Can Flash do advanced math functions such as coordinate tranformations? Can Flash do mercator projection of spherical coordinates?

Thanks in advance...