Re: Some other symbolic math programs...

[Nils Barth <nbarth@fas.harvard.edu>]

Thus spake George:
> I guess gluing together more packages sounds like the best strategy for
> dr genius anyway.  We get a LOT of functionality with a common interface that
> way.  Most of these packages have different and usually advanced interfaces
> (or are just programming libraries).  Which of course sucks for a program
> like dr genius which should be for people that just want to sit down and do
> some math without having to learn stuff.  However the functionality is there
> and rewriting it would be dumb.  (hence me using CLN even though I'm not too
> crazy about having to use a C++ compiler)

yeah -- for example, numerical linear algebra problems can be solved using
LINPACK, EISPACK, and LAPACK. This are available at
http://www.netlib.org/
(they have quite a bit of stuff there)
Only worries are: 
(1) these were designed for supercomputers, but I think they
should work fine on workstations.
(2) these are in fortran (though they've been convert to C, I think)
(3) licence issues -- I think these are basically free, but there may
    be some GPL incompatibilities (I hear LINPACK and EISPACK are
    public domain, but LAPACK might have some LaTeX-style license
    problems)
(4) They are BIG! Maybe just some subsets of these or adaptations?

However, they offer time-tested solutions to QR decompositions and
singular value decompositions etc. AFAIK, these are -the- standard
numerical matrix packages.

-- 
  -nils