A month of Math Software – November 2011

December 3rd, 2011 | Categories: math software, Month of Math Software | Tags:

Welcome to Walking Randomly’s monthly look at what’s new in the world of mathematical software.  Click here for last month’s edition and check out the archive for all previous editions.  If you have some news about mathematical software and want to get it out to over 2,500 subscribers then contact me and tell me all about it.

General mathematical software

  • Python(x,y) has been updated to version 2.7.2.1.  Python(x,y) is a free scientific and engineering development software for numerical computations, data analysis and data visualization
  • Version 2.17-13 of the number theoretic package, Magma, has been released.  Click here to see what’s new.
  • Freemat, a a free environment for rapid engineering,scientific prototyping and data processing similar to MATLAB, has seen its first major update in 2 years!  The big news in version 4.1 is a Just In Time (JIT) compiler which should speed up code execution a great deal.  There is also a significant improvement in Freemat’s ability to render multidimensional datasets thanks to integration of the Visualisation Toolkit (VTK).
  • The Euler Math Toolbox has been updated to version 13.1.  See the list of changes for details of what’s new.
  • Gnumeric saw a new major release in November with 1.11.0 (click here for changes) closely followed by some bug fixes in 1.11.1 (changes here).  Gnumeric is a free spreadsheet program for Linux and Windows.

Linear Algebra

  • LAPACK, The Fortran based linear algebra library that forms the bedrock of functionality in countless software applications,  has been updated to version 3.4.0.  Click here for the release notes.
  • MAGMA, A linear algebra library that is “similar to LAPACK but for heterogeneous/hybrid architectures, starting with current “Multicore+GPU” systems.” has been updated to version 1.1
  • PLASMA, The Parallel Linear Algebra for Scalable Multi-core Architectures, has been updated to version 2.4.5.  Click here for what’s new.

New Products

  • AccelerEyes have released a new product called ArrayFire – a free CUDA and OpenCL library for C, C++, Fortran, and Python
  • CULA Tools released a new product called CULA Sparse which is a GPU-accelerated library for linear algebra that provides iterative solvers for sparse systems.  They’ve also released a demo application to allow you to try the product out for free.

Vital Statistics

  • R version 2.14.0 has been released with a host of new features.  If you do any kind of statistical computing then R is the free, open source solution for you!

Pretty plots

  • Originlabs have updated their commercial windows plotting packages, Origin and OriginPro to version 8.6.  Here’s the press release.
  • A new incremental update of GNUPlot, a free multiplatform plotting package, has been released.  The release announcement tells us what new goodies we get in version 4.4.4.

Mobile

  • One of the best mobile mathematical applications that money can buy, SpaceTime, has released a new version for iOS and Mac OS X and changed its name to Math Studio.  Not to be confused with SMathStudio, another mobile mathematical application that is a clone of MathCad.
  • The guys behind the excellent Android based Python/Sympy app – MathScript – have released a beta of a new product called ScriptBlocks.

Odds and ends

  • RougeWave Software have released version 8.0 of the commercial IMSL C library.  Improvements include CUDA BLAS integration and a few new functions.  The full list is available on the what’s new page.
  • Bernard Liengme has written a Primer for SmathStudio (a free Mathcad clone)
  • Eureqa, a software tool for detecting equations and hidden mathematical relationships in your data, has seen a major new update: Eureqa II (Code Name Formulize).  Get it from http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/eureqa_download
  • The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) have put together a set of examples where various versions of their numerical library product (for Fortran, C and .NET) are used in Labview programs.
  • Scipy version 0.10.0 has been released.  Check out the release notes for the new stuff.
  1. MySchizoBuddy
    December 4th, 2011 at 03:29
    Reply | Quote | #1

    i love these series of monthly math softwares. you always find new gems like Eureqa.

  2. MySchizoBuddy
    December 4th, 2011 at 03:32
    Reply | Quote | #2

    Btw when I click on a link from the RSS of this blog. Are you able to track it as outgoing clicks. It’s important that the sites you are linking know you are linking to them.

  3. December 4th, 2011 at 11:18
    Reply | Quote | #3

    No idea I’m afraid but suspect that the answer is ‘not always’.

  4. MySchizoBuddy
    December 17th, 2011 at 19:22
    Reply | Quote | #4

    Geometry Expressions has released v3
    http://www.geometryexpressions.com/