Free Software for Scientific Computation and Visualisation

V. Sasikumar

There are several Free Software applications that can be used for analysing and visualising scientific data. This talk will cover some of them. These include:

bc - a command line arbitrary precision calculator with simple programming features.
octave - a Matlab-like application that can be used for data analysis, especially for manipulating matrices.
maxima - a Macsyma/Mathematica clone for symbolic mathematics and also numerical calculations.
grace - a WYSIWYG 2D graph plotter with very interesting features including non-linear curve fitting.
gnuplot - a command-line graph plotter that can handle 2D and 3D graphs.
opendx - a very powerful data visualisation application with a visual programming interface.