Windows: Simply download the 52.5 MB setup file and double-click it. All versions of FreeMat are kept at the same version level and functionality. In addition to pre-built packages for the above platforms, the source code is also available and is released under the GPL license. Installation – The latest version is 4.2 and is available for Windows (XP and up), Linux (various) and Mac OS X. Since Windows XP is supported, we can assume that XP-compatible hardware constitutes the base system. As an example, the Mac version uses about 85 MB of real memory on my system. The application itself doesn’t seem to use much memory. System Requirements – Specific hardware requirements were not available but the pre-built packages I tested all run on 32 or 64-bit Intel-compatible CPUs. FreeMat has been in development for over a decade by a group of volunteers As the name suggests It’s modeled after MatLab. Today in DIY Math we’re looking at FreeMat. The documentation is very good and there are plenty of tutorials and examples available at the project homepage and around the Web. If you’re doing batch processing of multiple datasets, this can save a lot of time and effort. Anything you can type in at the command prompt can be saved into a file, letting you easily set up long, complex sets of calculations that can be loaded into your workspace with a single command. You can write your own functions and even groups of functions (called packages) to extend R even further.Īnother advantage of R is automation. But they’re a general purpose tool and R has more math functionality. So why would you use it instead of a spreadsheet?įrankly, if you’re not a full-on numbers nerd, you may just want to stick with spreadsheets. R is a very powerful, interactive language for scientific and math computing. I was able to click on the image, select Copy from the Edit menu and paste directly in a document. We can get data in and manipulate it but how do we get it out? For text data, such as the correlation summary, you can just copy and paste it from the R gui window. Now you have a processed data set and you can continue working with it. R is a command line based tool so I wasn’t that surprised when I started up the program and got a window with a command prompt: I downloaded the Mac version of R from the main project site. If you understand the problem well enough to explain it to a computer, then by definition you understand the problem. I’m a firm believer in letting machines do the grunt work of mathematics. I teach undergraduate math and occasionally blog about math education so math software is a particular interest of mine. I’ve been looking forward to this for some time. The source code is also freely available so you can compile it for any platform you like. R is free and available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The name R is not just a play on the name S, but is also a tribute to the original developers, Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka, who were known at university as “R & R”. Currently it’s being maintained by the R Development Core Team, with contributors from all over the world. In the early 90’s, researchers at the University of Auckland, New Zealand developed a new version of S that they called R. But I really like ‘Bell Labs: Smart But Terse’.” “How about ‘Bell Labs: We Don’t Have Time For This’?” It was standard practice at the time to give programming languages single letter names. This was always annoying and occasionally painful, but there were no good alternatives until the mid-70’s, when researchers at Bell Labs developed the programming language ‘S’. (FORTRAN was my first programming language back in 1977. Assuming you didn’t have any typos, you got a printout of the results. You wrote your code, submitted it to the mainframe, which compiled and ran it. It wasn’t what you might call ‘interactive’. In the Olden Days (™), if you wanted a computer to do your math homework, you had to use FORTRAN. Once again, this is what you get when programmers write your sales materials – nothing but facts.
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