Welcome to the October edition of A Month of Math Software where I take a look at everything that is new and updated in the ever evolving world of mathematical software and programming. If you’d like something included in the next edition please contact me via whatever method suits you best.

GPU accelerated mathematics

In the old days Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) were only used to make computer games look pretty. These days they can do mathematics very quickly.

Plotting

Origin and OriginPro have both been upgraded to version 9. These commercial plotting packages for Windows are very popular and easy to use (My university has a site license for them and they are used a lot) and this major new release includes lots of new functionality.

DISLIN, a scientific plotting library for multiple languages, is now at version 10.2.5 with the new stuff discussed at http://www.mps.mpg.de/dislin/news.html

A new release candidate of matplotlib is now available at https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/downloads. New features include PGF/TikZ backend for easier LaTeX integration and picklable figures. The plots below were created using the new release candidate and come to you courtesy of @dmcdougall_



Free Statistics



A new maintenance release of R is now available. See what’s new in version 2.15.2 at https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-announce/2012/000557.html

The fantastic GUI/IDE for R, R Studio, has been updated to version 0.97. See the RStudio blog for the new goodness.

RKWard is another GUI/IDE for R that’s been around for over a decade. I’ve never used it but it must have a lot going for it because there is a large community of users. It was updated to version 0.6 in October and you can see what’s new here.

Misc

Stefan Kottwitz’s TeXblog has a round-up of recent news in the TeX and LaTeX typesetting community.

Version 2.18-11 of Magma has been released. Magama is a commercial computer algebra system designed for computations in algebra, number theory, algebraic geometry and algebraic combinatorics.

The free Euler math toolbox is now at version 19.2–the changelog has the details.

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