Walking Randomly

Welcome to the August edition of A Month of Math Software– a regular series of articles where I share what’s shiny and new in the world of mathematical software.  If you like what you see and want more, take a browse through the archives.  If you have some news that you think should go into next month’s edition, contact me to tell me all about it so I can tell the world.

This edition includes lots of new releases, blog posts and news about mathematics on mobile devices…enjoy!

Mobile Mathematics

August was a very big month for mobile mathematical applications with the following releases

• Full LaTeX on iPad with on device compilation and .dvi viewer
• Maxima  on Android – Maxima is a free computer algebra system with a long pedigree
• Octave on Android – Octave is basically a free version of MATLAB.  The author of this package is Corbin Champion who also wrote Addi (a simplified MATLAB clone based on JMathLib).  Corbin tried to get funding via kickstarter (see my article on this – here) to allow him to dedicate himself full time to this port but, sadly, was unsuccessful.  Thankfully, Corbin has managed to do some development on the project anyway and has released this package as a starter for 10.  Its lacking a lot of stuff but is a fantastic start!
• The Geogebra team have started a kickstarter project that aims to bring Geigebra to iPad.  Why not head over there and pledge some support?

General purpose mathematics

• Maxima, a free computer algebra system (CAS) for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX, has been updated to version 5.28.  Back in 2010, a guest writer wrote a Maxima tutorial here at WalkingRandomly – Maxima Tutorial – plotting direction fields for 1st order ODEs
• Mathics is a free, lightweight alternative to Mathematica and has recently been updated to version 0.5.
• Pari/GP is another free computer algebra system that was updated to 2.5.2 in August (The website says august but the changelog says June I’ve only just noticed the update so its going in August’s edition) —   Pari focuses on number theory but can be used for many other kinds of computation.
• The free Euler Math Toolbox has been updated many times throughout August and is now at version 18.4.  See the Changelog for what’s new.

Do numerical computing using….Javascript!

• The Numeric Javascript library has been updated to version 1.2.2. The main new feature is linear programming– the function is numeric.solveLP()

Mathematical software libraries

• The AMD Core Math Libray (ACML) has been updated to version 5.2.0.
• Version 2.4.6 of PLASMA (Parallel Linear Algebra for Scalable Multi-core Architectures) has been released.  See what’s new at http://icl.cs.utk.edu/plasma/news/news.html?id=299
• A new minor version of ARPACK-NG (3.1.2) has been released.  See http://forge.scilab.org/index.php/p/arpack-ng/source/tree/master/CHANGES for the newness.  ARPACK is a collection of Fortran77 subroutines designed to solve large scale eigenvalue problems

GPU Programming

GPU stands for Graphical Processing Unit but these days you can get a GPU to do a lot more than just graphics.  You could think of them as essentially massively parallel math  co-processors that can make light work of certain operations.

• Jacket is a commercial GPU Processing add-on for MATLAB.  In recent blog posts, the Jacket developers discuss SAR Image Formation Algorithms on the GPU and Option Pricing.
• CULA is a set of commercial GPU-accelerated linear algebra libraries.  CULA-Dense is, as you might expect, for dense matrices and is now at version 15.    CULA-Sparse is at version S3.  I can’t find a what’s new document but the main change seems to be the addition of support for NVIDIA’s Kepler architecture.  The CULA library can be called from C, C++, Fortran, MATLAB, and Python and is free for individual academic use.
• GPULib is a commercial software library enabling GPU-accelerated calculations for IDL.  In a recent blog post, one of GPULib’s developers has been experimenting with OpenCL support.

Statistics

• R Commander, a basic GUI for the free R programming language, has been updated to version 1.9.x
• IBM’s SPSS has been updated to version 21.  Some new features are discussed at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/analytics/spss/products/statistics/features.html
• VSN International have released version 15.1 of their bio-statistics package, Genstat.  The list of new stuff is at http://www.vsni.co.uk/software/genstat/15th-edition-new-features

Academic codes and applications

• Version 3.0 of the SCIP Optimization Suite has been released. According to the website, ‘SCIP is currently one of the fastest non-commercial mixed integer programming (MIP) solvers. It is also a framework for constraint integer programming and branch-cut-and-price’. Here are the all important Release Notes and Changelog.
• Templates for First-Order Conic Solvers (TFOCS, pronounced tee-fox) is a software package that provides a set of templates, or building blocks, that can be used to construct efficient, customized solvers for a variety of models.  The latest version, 1.1a, was released back in February but I have only recently learned of it and so am including it in this month’s edition.  A set of demos and wiki for this software is available.
• Version 1.0 of Blaze has been released.  Blaze is an open-source, high-performance C++ math library for dense and sparse arithmetic.  There is a getting started tutorial and a set of benchmarks.