A Month of Math Software – January 2011
I tend to keep an eye out for news relating to mathematical software and thought that I’d start sharing my monthly notebook with the world in case it proved to be useful to anyone else. If you have any math-software news that you’d like to share then feel free to contact me.
Releases – Commercial
Mathcad Prime 1.0 has been released by PTC who have almost completely rewrote it from scratch. Interestingly, you get a version of Mathcad 15.0 thrown in for free when you buy a copy. See my discussion of this new version here.
MAGMA v2.17-3 has been released and the changelog is here. Magma is a large software package designed for computations in algebra, number theory, algebraic geometry and algebraic combinatorics.
Version 12 of the popular plotting package, Sigmaplot, has been released. The press release is at www.sigmaplot.com/aboutus/pressroom_details.php?link=jan-2010
Releases – Open Source
A bug-fix version of Matplotlib has been released – version 1.0.1 – and the changelog is available on sourceforge. Matplotlib is a 2D plotting library for Python.
SAGE 4.6.1 has been released. The detailed changelog is here. SAGE’s mission is “Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab.”
deal.II version 7 has been released. deal.II is a C++ program library targeted at the computational solution of partial differential equations using adaptive finite elements.
JQuantlibLib version 0.2.4 released. Details here. JQuantLib is a BSD Licensed, open-source, comprehensive framework for quantitative finance, written in Java.
Mobile Math Software
Wolfram Research have released a trio of iPhone apps called Course Assistants. Essentially these are nice user interfaces to Wolfram Alpha that make it easier to use in specific subject domains. The initial offering consists of Algebra, Calculus and Music Theory. Stephen Wolfram has blogged about the new apps.
MATLAB software community
The Mathworks have launched a MATLAB-specific question and answer site called MATLAB Answers. In conjunction with the venerable comp.soft-sys.matlab newsgroup and the more recent Stack Overflow, MATLABers now have more question and answer resources than ever. The Matworks have a blog article about the new service.
New Books
Introduction to Scientific Computing by Victor Eijkhout. You can download it for free or get a printed copy for under 12 pounds.
For it’s price, free, Microsoft Mathematics 4.0 is also worth mention
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9caca722-5235-401c-8d3f-9e242b794c3a
Definitely! Thanks for that one Dave – I hadn’t noticed it.
Wanted to bring to your attention EureKalc ( http://web.me.com/nicohirtt/EureKalc/English.html ). It is MathCad type software for Macs. It is opensource and the only one of it’s kind on the Mac.
Another very unique math program on Mac is Solution ( http://www.solutionapp.net/ ).
Looking forward to your review of them if you have time.