Walking Randomly

Last month I started a new feature called a Month of Math Software and since it turned out to be quite popular I thought I’d do it again. If you have any math software news or reviews that you’d like included in next month’s edition then feel free to contact me.

Releases – Commercial
Magma V2.17-5 has been released and the list of changes is here. Magma is a large software package designed for computations in algebra, number theory, algebraic geometry and algebraic combinatorics.

Releases – Open Source
A major new version of Octave, a high quality, open-source alternative to MATLAB, has been released. Version 3.4.0 has been available from February 8th and the changelog is available at www.gnu.org/software/octave/NEWS-3.4.html

A new mathematics package for Mac OS X has been produced – EureKalc 3.  Screenshot below.  Currently at version 3.ß.02

Version 11 beta of Euler Math Toolbox has been released with some new symbolic functionality.  There is a blog post on the new functionality at http://sourceforge.net/apps/wordpress/eumat/2011/02/07/version-11/

A new stable release of Gnumeric (The spreadsheet component of GNOME Office) has been released.  The new version is 1.10.3 and recent changes can be found at http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/announcements/1.10/gnumeric-1.10.13.shtml

Optimization
Professor Stan Uryasev from the University of Florida has produced a website containing a suite of optimization test problems.

Version 2 of Sergey Moiseev’s free DirectSearch optimization package for Maple has been released. The DirectSearch package is a collection of commands to numerically compute local and global minimums (maximums) of nonlinear multivariate function with (without) constraints.

Blog articles about math software
Mona Zeftel has written an article on PTC’s Mathcad Engineering blog about Mathcad’s new box plots including How-Tos for both Mathcad 15 and Mathcad Prime 1.0.

The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) discusses the double-edged sword of SSE instructions in Wandering Precision.  SSE instructions can make your numerical algorithms significantly faster but this comes at a price.

Non Deterministic Floating Point conversions in Java.  More SSE weirdness; a very detailed article that explains an odd bug in Java on certain architectures.