Walking Randomly

Welcome to September’s A Month of Math Software.  Last month’s can be found here and the archive is here.  If you’ve got news for next month’s edition then contact me.

General mathematics and statistics

• The commercial computer algebra package, MAGMA, has been upgraded to version 2.17-11.  The change log is at magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/magma/releasenotes/2/17/11/
• Version 2011b of MATLAB has been released.  I’m all excited about the improved GPU functionality in the parallel computing toolbox along with the that fact that the MATLAB compiler now supports GPU-enabled code.  This little combination means that we’ll be able to include a small amount of MATLAB/GPU support on Manchester University’s Condor pool.  If GPU support isn’t your thing then maybe you’d like to hear about updates to the MATLAB comparison tool from Mike on the MATLAB Desktop.
• Version 2.13.2 of the extremely popular free, open source statistics pacakge, R, has been released.  This is intended to be the last of the 2.13 series and you can find out what’s new by going to https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-announce/2011/000543.html

Freely available linear algebra software

• Jack Dongarra et al have updated their survey of freely available software for linear algebra.
• Version 2.4.2 of PLASMA (Parallel Linear Algebra for Scalable Multi-core Architectures) has been released.  Click here for a list of the new stuff.

Math software in the blogs

• Sage: Creating a Viable Free Open Source Alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB – a blog post by Sage’s creator, William Stein
• Robert Talbert asks questions about the fundamental theorem of calculus while looking at Maple, Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha.  On a related note I had fun with an integral with MATLAB and Mathematica.
• “Neil Bickford calculated the first 458 million terms for the continued fraction of pi, breaking the previous record of 180 million. He used Mathematica to develop his code and verify his results—which he posted shortly after he turned 13.” – Check out the full story at The Wolfram Blog: From Pi to Puzzles
• The R Graph Gallery has gone social.  Read about the details at Revolutions – http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/09/the-r-graph-gallery-goes-social.html
• Two Suns in the Sunset – NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered a planet orbiting two stars, something like Tatooine in Star Wars.  Yeah, I know that this hasn’t got anything to do with math software but it is very cool!