A Month of Math Software – July 2012

August 5th, 2012 | Categories: Month of Math Software | Tags:

Welcome to the slightly delayed July 2012 edition of A Month of Math Software where I take a look at recent events in the world of commercial and open source mathematical software. Feel free to contact me if you have news that you’d like including in next month’s edition.

Mark 23 of the NAG Toolbox for MATLAB

The latest version of my favourite MATLAB Toolbox has been released. Mark 23 of the NAG (Numerical Algorithms Group) Toolbox for MATLAB includes lots of new stuff in areas such as global optimisation, wavelet transforms, option pricing formulae, weighted nearest correlation matrices, curve and surface fitting and loads more.  NAG have also thrown in a lot of usability improvements for good measure.

The NAG Toolbox for MATLAB is essentially a MATLAB interface to NAG’s highly regarded Fortran library and contains over 1500 numerical routines.   My employer, The University of Manchester, has a full site license for the NAG Toolbox along with several other NAG products and they are used a lot.

I’ve written about old versions of the NAG toolbox several times including:

Spreadsheets that aren’t Excel

General purpose mathematics

  • Version 5.2 of Sage was released on 25th July. Sage is one of the best open-source mathematical packages available and is based on Python.  See what’s new by reading the release annoucement.  Earlier this month, I reported on a new interactive mathematics website based on Sage.
  • Smath Studio is a superb free clone of PTC’s Mathcad and it’s recently been updated to verision 0.95.4594.   One exciting piece of news is that the developer is working on an Android version!
  • Numeric Javascript is now at version 1.1.8.  There is probably new stuff but I have no idea what it is as I can’t find a changelog.  Looks good though!
  • Version 17 of the free Euler Math Toolbox is now available with previews of version 18 already in the works (below).

Euler Math Toolbox

Python

  • Version 0.8.1 of pandas, The Python Data Analysis Library, has been released.  See what’s new at http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/whatsnew.html
  • A release candidate for SciPy 0.11 is now available and includes lots of neat stuff.  The optimisation section seems to have had a major overhaul for example.  Note that this is not the final release of 0.11 and so some bugs may be lingering.
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  1. Júlio Hoffimann Mendes
    August 6th, 2012 at 00:31
    Reply | Quote | #1

    I found Miramath (http://sourceforge.net/projects/miramath/) a lightweight alternative to Mathcad. I never tried Smath Studio because their website is a bit disorganized, but i’ll give it a try in the future.

    Thanks!

  2. Mike Croucher
    August 6th, 2012 at 07:11
    Reply | Quote | #2

    Thanks for that Julio. I’d never heard of miramath and it looks great.

  3. Damon McDougall
    August 6th, 2012 at 19:27
    Reply | Quote | #3

    There’s also mpmath (http://code.google.com/p/mpmath/). It’s a pure Python library for arbitrary precision floating point arithmetic.