On Sun, 24 Apr 2005, Ben Jordan wrote: > Jonathan Rogness from the University of Minnesota's Mathematics > department will be coming to talk to us about his uses of Linux and Open > Source technology in Mathematics and Computer Science. As an avid user > and proponent of both at the U of M, this promises to be an interesting > look into the tools and resources available for thsi application. I attended Jonathan's talk. It was a good overview of how computer programs can be used in mathematics. His interest seemed to be in pure math -- computer proofs and such. He recommended MATLAB, Maple and Mathematica -- all proprietary programs, but noted that Octave may soon be able to replace MATLAB. I agree that Octave is really good, but I was disappointed that there was practically no discussion of alternatives to Maple and Mathematica (I heard him say the word "Maxima" but I didn't hear him describe it at all -- look here: http://maxima.sourceforge.net/). Perhaps Maple/Mathematica are light years ahead of the FOSS competition, but it still would have been nice to hear how they are superior, and to hear what the FOSS alternatives are now able to do. One thing Jonathan left off: R. R is a great program for statistics and graphics. It is a GNU GPL project. Read all about it here: http://www.r-project.org/ I think there is a very high probability that R will ultimately become the #1 stat package, if that hasn't already happened. I guess Jon probably left R off because it is stat and not math. Anyway, I thank Jon for taking the time to do his presentation on a Saturday afternoon. He had many interesting things to show us and his talk was very well received. Mike -- Michael B. Miller, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Division of Epidemiology and Community Health and Institute of Human Genetics University of Minnesota http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/