scientific computing
CGAL from scratch
So, you need computational geometry. It could be you need some nice Voronoi division of some domain. Or you need to mesh a surface. Whatever your needs, you may know there is this CGAL project that has these things implemented in a very professional manner. Here is a list of steps in order to get [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Emacs in scientific computing
Part 5 of my series of Scientific Computing underdogs! GNU emacs is widely know as a powerful text editor for, e.g., programming. Its indentation and syntax highlighting are excellent. However, I realized I have been using it for a while to deal with raw data – in this regard one could call this program an [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Natural coordinates
Here is an interesting application of Voronoi tesselations / Delaunay triangulations (see previous post The alpha shapes for another one.) Suppose you have a set of points carrying some information, let’s call them particles; the simplest case is just a scalar number representing some field whose value is only known for the particles. Then, you [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )awk
Ok, how is awk an underdog in scientific computing. Well, it is very well suited for performing simple tasks on data files. E.g., you may run awk ‘{print $1-45,$2/1800*0.82}’ intr.dat To shift the x value from the first column of the data file, and scale the y value from the second. Or anything one could [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )gnuplot
Part 3 of my series on scientific computing underdogs!!! gnuplot has been around for a long, long time. One of its main features is that it can run as a session, in a terminal. This is helpful when graphics are not available, e.g. in a remote login session. Just type “set terminal dumb” to get [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )xmgrace
Part 2 of my series of scientific computing underdogs! When it comes to plotting and analyzing data, I think a lot of people use (xm)grace, specially those working in linux and other UNIX-like environments. The other main plotting solution is, of course, gnuplot, which is nicely complementary (probably an underdog, too, deserving its own entry). [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )g3data
Part 1 on my series of scientific software underdogs! Thanks to Descartes, most publications show graphs of results, but no data. Of course, the corresponding tables would take lots of paper space. (Lately, many journals offer free additional online repositories for this sort of data, but this good idea seems to be catching on rather [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )Computer math systems
A brief survey of the ones I have tried, with the student version price (as of mid 2008). Computer algebra systems (see wikipedia comparison) derive. Very simple, very easy. Unfortunately, it seems discontinued. Mathematica. Incredibly powerful. But: crazy syntax, annoying graphic interface (it used to be impossible to rotate 3D objects, I don’t know if [...]
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