A Month of Math Software – January 2013
Welcome to the first Month of Math Software for 2013. January was a rather lean month in the world of mathematica software I’m afraid but there are a few things worthy of attention. If you have some news for me for next month’s edition, contact me via the usual channels.
Commerical computer algebra
- PTC have released a cut-down version of Mathcad Prime called Mathcad Express. It was actually launched back in October 2012 but I only learned about it this month. Regular readers of WalkingRandomly will also know about SMath Studio, a freeware application that looks a bit like a clone of Mathcad and runs on many operating systems.
- Wolfram Research have released Mathematica 9.0.1, a minor upgrade from version 9. To see what’s new take a look at Wolfram’s quick revision history http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/quick-revision-history.html (Thanks to people in the comments section for this link)
Python
- Pandas, a data analysis library for Python, saw a minor update to version 0.10.1. See the pandas ‘What’s new?’ page for more details.
- Version 5.6 of the Python-based computer algebra system, SAGE, has been released. See the changelog for details of the new stuff.
C++
- Blaze is “an open-source, high-performance C++ math library for dense and sparse arithmetic” and it has seen its second release. Head over to Blaze’s website to grab yourself a copy of version 1.1.
Shiny
- Shiny wasn’t released in January but this was the first month I heard about it and it looks fantastic. Brought to my attention by long time WalkingRandomly reader, ‘MySchizoBuddy’, Shiny is brought to us from the creators of RStudio. In his words ‘It’s similar to Mathematica’s CDF plugin but without the plugin. It allows you to have small R code and visualizations on the web without any plugins http://www.rstudio.com/shiny/’
All your probability distribution are belong to us
- Wolfram Research have put together The Ultimate Univariate Probability Distribution Explorer using Mathematica. A great demonstration of the power of Wolfram’s .cdf document format.
You can find the revision history of Mathematica 9 here: http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/quick-revision-history.html
Hi, thanks for the heads up about Mathematica 9.0.1. I found a short change-list here: http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/quick-revision-history.html
Blaze test results look pretty amazing. Too good to be true :)
Any idea on how to get Mathematica 9.0.1? I own version 9.0.0, are these upgrades free?
If you are still in maintenance, I expect that you’ll be contacted by Wolfram at some point and told where to get the good stuff.
All I know for certain is that they are ‘free’ for my users and I since we have a fully paid up unlimited site license.
I can’t seem to find anything in the User Portal. I can only download 9.0.0 for all the OSs. I guess I have to wait a little bit.
Thanks, –Sander
I contacted user support and they told me that everybody who has version 9.0.0 will get version 9.0.1 for free (even with the home edition). Wolfram will send out emails in the following days.
Any news from WR? I own a Mathematica 9.0.0 home edition license, but up to now it seems that I have to pay 95 euros+vat for upgrading to version 9.0.1….
Regards.
G.