More about Octave and Matlab

• Matlab stands for ``Matrix Laboratory'', not for ``Mathematics Laboratory''. As such its usefulness becomes more apparent on small partial differential equations problems, which often result in operations on relatively small matrices.
• Octave is named after Prof. Octave Levenspiel, the author of ``Chemical Reaction Engineering'', New York, Wiley, 1972, 573 pp., ISBN 0471530166.
• Both systems derive their strengh from

  1.

  BLAS

  2.

  DASSL

  3.

  EISPACK

  4.

  FFTPACK

  5.

  LAPACK

  6.

  LINPACK

  7.

  MINPACK

  8.

  ODEPACK

  9.

  QUADPACK

  all of which are public domain libraries distributed by ORNL, netlib.ornl.gov. These libraries can be accessed from a Fortran program just as easily, but not interactively. We will cover some of those later in the course.
• Octave documentation is available on-line through our (OVPIT) Emacs, i.e., Emacs that lives in /afs/ovpit.indiana.edu, info.
  • Type M-x info, or C-h i to bring up info.
  • Search down for the line:

    * Octave: (octave).     Interactive language for numerical computations.
    * Octave FAQs: (Octave-FAQ.info).
                            Frequently Asked Questions about Octave.
    * Octave Library: (liboctave.info).
                            About Octave's C++ library.
    

  • Position your cursor on any of those and press return.
• Octave documentation can be also found in

  /afs/ovpit.indiana.edu/common/gnu/doc/octave-2.0.13
  

  and in

  http://beige.ucs.indiana.edu/PostScript/gnu/octave
  

  There is a pointer to this directory on the OVPIT front page: http://beige.ucs.indiana.edu.
• We will explore Octave and Matlab more in the second part of the course, when we are going to talk about fields.