[LUGSB] New project: GNUmatica

[Michael Graffam]

Hello all,

I'm new on campus -- a junior transfer student, majoring in mathematics.

I just wanted to announce a project that I'm working on and I wanted to
take this chance to invite any other interested Stony Brook GNU/Linux
hackers to help.

GNUmatica will be a distribution of math-oriented Linux software.
Specifically the programs: GNU TeXmacs (mathematical typesetting editor),
GNU Octave (MATLAB-like numerical mathematics) and Maxima (a symbolic
computer algebra system similar to Maple).

TeXmacs has the ability to call external programs. These external systems
can be designed, or patched to interact with TeXmacs to display richly
formatted mathematical expressions, graphs, trees, plots and so forth.

GNUmatica will include patched versions of Maxima and Octave to work
with  TeXmacs. The final leg of the project will be to allow Octave to interact
with Maxima for symbolic expressions.

Octave and Maxima are interacting with TeXmacs now, and can display very
nice typset-quality output in a fashion similar to Maple or Mathematica.
This interface is in some ways already far superior to Octave's native
terminal/readline-based console or MATLAB's Java console, though much work
remains to be done.

I'll be coming to the next LUGSB meeting with my laptop to demo the
software to anyone who'd like to see.

I'd love to develop this software further here at SB and put it in a
head-to-head competition with Maple down the road. :)