{"id":3682,"date":"2011-07-31T11:55:51","date_gmt":"2011-07-31T10:55:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3682"},"modified":"2011-07-31T11:55:51","modified_gmt":"2011-07-31T10:55:51","slug":"a-month-of-math-software-july-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3682","title":{"rendered":"A Month of Math Software &#8211; July 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to July&#8217;s Month of Math Software, my regular summary of news and releases in the world of software for the mathematically inclined.\u00a0 If you have a news item that you&#8217;d like to share in next month&#8217;s offering then feel free to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?page_id=2055\">contact me<\/a> to discuss it.\u00a0 If you like what you see here then take a look at some of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?cat=47\">previous editions<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Commercial Software Releases<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>VSN International have released <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vsni.co.uk\/2011\/asides\/genstat-14-released\/\">version 14 of their data analysis tool, Genstat<\/a> for the biosciences.\u00a0 Interestingly, they also have a cut-down free version of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vsni.co.uk\/software\/genstat-teaching\/\">Genstat for teaching use<\/a> in schools and Universities.<\/li>\n<li>Jacket, the most feature-complete GPU toolbox for MATLAB, was updated to version 1.8 this month with a whole host of <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.accelereyes.com\/wiki\/index.php\/Release_Notes#Version_1.8\">new features and functions<\/a>.\u00a0 Jacket&#8217;s sister project, libJacket&#8211; a GPU library for C\/C++\/Fortran and Python, also saw an <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.accelereyes.com\/wiki\/libjacket\/release_notes.htm\">update to version 1.1<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Version 12 of the general purpose statistical package, STATA,\u00a0 has been released.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stata.com\/news\/statanews.26.2.pdf\">Click here to get the large pdf file<\/a> that announces this release and tells us what&#8217;s new.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/magma.maths.usyd.edu.au\/magma\/releasenotes\/2\/17\/10\/\">2.17-10<\/a> of the computer algebra package, MAGMA, has been release.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Freeware and Open Source Software Releases<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If you are working with statistics then <a href=\"http:\/\/www.r-project.org\/\">R<\/a> is probably<strong> the<\/strong> software package that you need to be using, no matter what operating system you prefer.\u00a0 Version 2.13.1 was released on July 8th and details of what&#8217;s new can be found at <a href=\"http:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/bin\/windows\/base\/NEWS.R-2.13.1.html\">http:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/bin\/windows\/base\/NEWS.R-2.13.1.html<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Scilab, a high quality free alternative to MATLAB, has seen a minor upgrade.\u00a0 Version 5.3.3 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scilab.org\/news\/events\/20110722\">corrects a couple of bugs<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Numpy is a Python add-on that is almost essential if you plan to use Python for numerical computing.\u00a0 It adds support for vectors and matrices to Python along with facilities such as random number generation and FFTs.\u00a0 Numpy was upgraded to version 1.6.1, a <a href=\"http:\/\/fossplanet.com\/f8\/ann-numpy-1-6-1-release-182239\/\">bugfix release<\/a>,\u00a0 on July 20th.<\/li>\n<li>PLASMA (The Parallel Linear Algebra for Scalable Multi-core Architectures) has seen a <a href=\"http:\/\/icl.cs.utk.edu\/plasma\/news\/news.html?id=271\">bug-fix release with version 2.4.1<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Blog articles<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>StrongInference has <a href=\"http:\/\/stronginference.com\/weblog\/2011\/7\/15\/innovations-in-ipython.html\">put up a great article<\/a> about the upcoming IPython 0.11.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/ipython.org\/\">IPython<\/a> is an enhanced interactive python shell that includes things such as matplotlib integration, interactive parallel computing and more.\u00a0 It&#8217;s great for the sort of interactive scientific calculations that people might otherwise use MATLAB and Mathematica for.<\/li>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/ipython.org\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/images\/python\/i_python_besselj.png\" alt=\"IPython\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<li>The Mathworks show us how to <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/loren\/2011\/07\/18\/a-mandelbrot-set-on-the-gpu\/\">calculate the Mandelbrot factal on a GPU<\/a> using the Parallel Computing Toolbox.<\/li>\n<li>Wolfram Research <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wolfram.com\/2011\/07\/21\/launching-the-computable-document-format-cdf-dont-compress-the-idea-expand-the-medium\/\">officially launch the CDF document format<\/a>.\u00a0 Learn how to<a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3323\"> embed them into webpages<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Over at Playing with Mathematica, Sol has gone <a href=\"http:\/\/playingwithmathematica.com\/2011\/07\/23\/analog-clock-in-mathematica\/\">crazy<\/a> with <a href=\"http:\/\/playingwithmathematica.com\/2011\/07\/25\/digital-clock-in-mathematica\/\">Mathematica<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/playingwithmathematica.com\/2011\/07\/26\/creative-and-cool-clock-code\/\">clocks<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to July&#8217;s Month of Math Software, my regular summary of news and releases in the world of software for the mathematically inclined.\u00a0 If you have a news item that you&#8217;d like to share in next month&#8217;s offering then feel free to contact me to discuss it.\u00a0 If you like what you see here then [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math-software","category-month-of-math-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-Xo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3682"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3783,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682\/revisions\/3783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}