MAC_2015
Matlab Addiction Clinic
Senior Seminar in Scientific Computing

http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/classes/mac_2015/mac_2015.html

MAC_2015 is the home page for the class ISC4932, "Matlab Addiction Clinic", Senior Seminar in Scientific Computing, an undergraduate seminar class offered by the Department of Scientific Computing at Florida State University, Fall Session 2015.

This is a 1-credit seminar class, intended to introduce the students to ideas, algorithms, and programs common to Scientific Computing. The topic this semester will be numerical linear algebra.

While the Scientific Computing Department definitely requires computing, most of our classes allow the student to choose the computing language that is used. For many of our students, this means Matlab, which has the advantage that it is interactive, doesn't require compilation, doesn't require variable declaration, comes with a full graphics package, has an extensive built in numerical library, offers many specialized toolboxes, and can easily access Matlab functions written by other people.

Students may be dismayed to discover, on beginning their careers, that they no longer have access to a free copy of Matlab and that their employer requires the use of a compiled language and expects the solution of computational problems that were easily done with Matlab.

This class will demonstrate alternatives to Matlab. We will cover a wide range of scientific computing tasks, solve them in Matlab, and then consider how they could be handled in a non-Matlab environment. Critical issues will include:

• software that does not require payment;
• software that does not have licensing restrictions;
• software that can run under different operating systems;
• the ability to make graphics;
• software for which documentation is available;
• software for which working examples are available;
• the ability to access numerical libraries;
• the ability to access application libraries;
• the ability to work interactively or to store large codes as files.
• speed of execution;
• the possibility of parallel execution;

The class meets on ?days, from ?to?, in room ?.

A tentative schedule:

• A world without Windows?
  Installing and using VirtualBox;
  Learning enough to survive on a Unix system.
• A world without Matlab?
• Is Octave a Matlab "clone"?
• Scilab isn't a clone, but is it close?
• Does Python have everything Matlab has?
• Using a Compiled Language: C
• Finding and Linking Numerical Libraries
• Application Libraries
• Learning the Language of File Formats
• Graphics with files via Gnuplot
• Graphics in Python using Matplotlib:
• Graphics with a compiled language: Dislin:
• Parallel Programming with or without Matlab: