Walking Randomly

Welcome to this month’s ‘A month of Math software.’  If you missed the September edition then why not take a look at https://www.walkingrandomly.com/?p=3534. All previous editions can be found at the Month of Math Software Archives.  If you have some mathematical software news for the November 2011 edition then feel free to contact me.

General Mathematics and Statistics

• After being in beta for a while, version 4 of GeoGebra has been released.  I confess that I’ve never used it but it looks great and it’s free!
• Wolfram’s Mathematica has seen a minor update with version 8.0.4.  The previous version was 8.0.1 and the list of changes between the two is given here.
• The free MATLAB clone, Octave, has seen a bug-fix upgrade with version 3.4.3.
• Version 2.17.12 of the computational algebra package, Magma, has been released.  The change log is at http://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/magma/releasenotes/2/17/12/
• Rene Grothmann has updated his Euler Math Toolbox, a numerical package that has some similarities to MATLAB, to version 12.9. This new release includes the LSODA algorithm for stiff equations.  He gives examples of the new functionality at http://euler.rene-grothmann.de/Programs/Examples/Stiff%20Equation.html

Mathematics on GPUs

• Jacket, the GPU-accelerated toolbox for MATLAB has been upgraded to version 1.8.2.  The new functionality is listed at http://wiki.accelereyes.com/wiki/index.php/Release_Notes#09.2F29.2F2011_-v1.8.2
• Mark 0.5 of the Numberical Algorithms Group’s GPU library has been released.  This new version includes routines such as LU factorization, Cholesky factorization and random numbers from the Gamma distribution.  One piece of good news is that the library is currently free for academic use.
• The AMD Core Math Library for Graphic Processors (ACML-GPU) was discontinued this month….superseded by the AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing Math Libraries (APPML).

Scientific Plotting

• Matplotlib is a very capable plotting library for the Python programming language and it has just been updated.  Version 1.1 has lots of nice new features and you can read about them all at http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/users/whats_new.html
• DISLIN is a plotting library that can be called from many languages including C and Fortran.  October saw it updated to version 10.1.5 and you can see what’s new from DISLIN’s news page.

Mobile Mathematics

• I discovered a couple of free MATLAB clones for Android this month – Addi and Mathmatiz.  My favourite of the two is Addi, partly because Mathmatiz insists on serving me adverts while using it.  I’d happily pay for a version of Mathmatiz that didn’t include adverts though!
• One mobile application that I’ve been meaning to mention for months is MathScript.  This Android based application allows you to write and run python programs directly on your device.  It also comes with some basic plotting functionality and a full version of SymPy which turns it into a very capable mathematical compute engine.
• Maplesoft have released The Maple Player for iPad which allows interactive Maple documents to be used on Apple’s tablet devices.  This first release comes with a few pre-installed documents that shows the sort of thing that the software is capable of.  The initial set of topics includes Laplace Transforms, a function plotter, integration tutor and more.  At the moment we can’t publish our own Maple documents to iPad but it looks like this is what Maplesoft are planning for the future.