Department of Engineering

IT Services

Maths

Matlab

matlab contains many numerical analysis routines. Also installed is

Matlab routines can also be called from C or fortran. The routines are documented online. Copies of the External Interface Guide manual are available from the operators at the end of the DPO.

octave

octave is available on our teaching system. It's somewhat like Matlab, but it's free. It has extensive tools for solving common numerical linear algebra problems, finding the roots of nonlinear equations, integrating ordinary functions, manipulating polynomials, and integrating ordinary differential and differential-algebraic equations.

Mathematica

We don't have Mathematica on the central system, but we have the player - MathematicaPlayer - so you can run programs like those on http://demonstrations.wolfram.com.

Maths Routines and Numerical Analysis

netlib has software for various languages. A useful program from there is paranoia, software for exploring the floating point system on your computer. For info about floating point maths, David W. Fanning's article might also be useful.

GSL is the GNU Scientific Library - a numerical library for C and C++ programmers. It is free software under the GNU General Public License. The library provides a wide range of mathematical routines such as random number generators, special functions and least-squares fitting. There are over 1000 functions in total with an extensive test suite.

The University's computing service offers a course on computer arithmetic. Extensive course notes are online - see How Computers Handle Numbers

Look at our Scientific Computing page if you intend doing lots of numerical work.

Other Maths Resources

Try The Online Mathematics Subject Tree or Yahoo for journals, software, and links to other sites. The WWW Math Archive is also good. You can try Cambridge University's Pure Mathematics department or Newton Institute.

The sci.math.symbolic newsgroup may be useful too. sci.math.research is less read.

FLENS is a Flexible Library for Efficient Numerical Solutions.

The Travelling Salesman Problem has a page too.

The NRICH Online Maths Club publishes a magazine and has a page of maths links

Statistics

matlab and the general maths resources listed above all contain statistical routines. There's also StatLib (Carnegie Mellon's library of resources including Software).

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