Tools for the math wiz or wannabe.

Today I am going to describe several applications that I use very infrequently since I no longer model experimental systems like I did when i worked as a research engineer at SRI International. in those days i had to write my own code, but nowadays we just plug in the equations into an app like FreeMat. This is an open source work alike of MatLab. if you don’t work with mathematical models then read on down to the next more application. But for us people who work with statistics, or image processing, or just plain matrix manipulation then FreeMat can be a real tool.

This App is located here.

The Website gives us many reasons to look deeply at this wonderful addition to any applied mathematician’s toolkit

The current release of FreeMat is 3.0. It represents a significant improvement over the prior release (2.0). Here is a partial list of the changes:

• MATLAB-style GUIs and Widgets
• Speed improvements (loops and indexing operations are 10 to 100 times faster)
• A new parser that recognizes more of the MATLAB syntax
• A debugger that is integrated with the editor
• Support for 64-bit integers
• Improved MAT-file support
• Universal binary support for Mac OS X
• New graph/plot tools to rotate, zoom and pan plots.
• Builds are now based on ATLAS.
• Various bug fixes.

Note: If you downloaded the Mac OS X bundle on January 15th, it was broken. A new bundle has been uploaded.

For more fun with math then we will move to the past, fractals!

Now this little wonder is written in java, so it may not be the fastest in the world, but it is fully multithreaded and will take advantage of your dualcore system.  But hey if you let it run all night then you can be surprised in the morning.  Now this is beta software and has problems with screen refresh.  If you don’t see any menu’s when you start teh application then try resizing the window, and they will magically appear.

Now this app can produce some image quickly and comes with several examples that will take you straight back to the ’80s.  If you enjoy this every once in a while then this application is here.

[tags]microface, open source, math, fractal[/tags]