Software Info Page

William O. Bray


	Over the years I have explored and made use of a variety of software packages in both the Windows and Linux environments. Many things can be said for both environments and I will not bring into this webpage the ongoing discussions and battles save one comment. Linux is part of the Open Source world, as such users can get involved with further developments.

Primarily Windows (proprietary)

Scientific Word (www.mackichan.com): This is a Windows frontend to LaTex. In terms of typesetting mathematics I have found no other software quite comparable.
Scientific Notebook: A package available from the same place as Scientific Word. The essential feature is to make use of the powerful equation editor from Scientific Word linked to the computer algebra package MuPad. As such it provides an easily used notebook frontend to MuPad. Quite useful for putting mathematics on the web, writing exams and homework sets.
Matlab (www.mathworks.com): Matlab is a powerful numerical and graphic visualization package used throughout the engineering and scientific world. It contains powerful optimized algorithms for virtually all computational aspects of mathematics: linear algebra, solving systems of differential equations, optimization problems, Fourier analysis. Development and control of graphics in Matlab are second to none. I have been developing a Matlab tutorial for my courses, this can be found HERE
Adobe GoLive (www.adobe.com): This is an awesome drag and drop tool for building webpages and sites. It sure beats writing the html code. The Mathematics & Statistics webpages were constructed using this page.

Linux Distributions: Linux comes via several distributions. I am fond of the Mandrake flavor of Linux found at www.mandrake.com

Lyx (www.lyx.org): Lyx is a document processor much like Scientific Word although documents are stored in ascii format other than Tex. Lyx uses LaTex to process the document and Lyx documents can be exported to LaTex. The equation editor in Lyx is highly useful and for complicated equations far simplier than writing LaTex.

Kile (kile.sourceforge.net) Kile is a KDE frontend to LaTex. It provides and easy to use editor for constructing and processing LaTex documents. Far easier than command line LaTex.

SciLab (www-roccq.inria.fr/scilab/) Some say that Scilab is a Matlab clone, I beg to differ. Scilab was originally writting to solve problems in control enginneering and hence has a different perspective. Scilab contains powerful numerical algorithms for solving a variety of problems and graphics are easily exported to, e.g. Xfig, for post-processing.

Octave (octave.sourceforge.net) Octave is a close relative to Matlab with similar syntax and capabilities. One weakness is the the use of GnuPlot to handlle graphics requiring considerable command line work for processing graphics.

MuPad (www.mupad.de) This provides an easily used computer algebra system which is almost as powerful as the well known programs Maple and Mathematica. The graphics are easily manipulated and processed though user menus in the X-window system.


Last Modified: 7/25/2003