Mathematics: it's the foundation of good designSeptember 2006Our resident software guru revisits the area of mathematical solvers and plotters to bring you the latest enhancements that will help you in your quest for better design It's been a while since I last visited the field of maths software packages, so I thought a round-up of the latest versions and updates would be useful. Kicking off with MATLAB from The MathWorks (www.mathworks.com), this product is now in version 7.2 and includes support for Windows XP Professional x64. This means you can take advantage of the increased available address space to access and manipulate larger data sets and run bigger, more data intensive applications. Good examples include flight test data analysis or geophysical image processing, which often demand more than the 2Gb of available memory of 32-bit systems.
MATLAB 7.2 also offers improved analysis and visualisation of time series data and now includes an interactive graphical interface for this purpose. When you can manipulate data and time together you reduce the risk or errors creeping into your work and save a lot of time into the bargain. MATLAB is essentially a high-level programming language for heavy-duty number-crunching and graphing; you will need to export the results into Word, PowerPoint and so on, in order to present them.
With Maple, which is supported in the UK by Adept Scientific (http://maple.adeptscience.co.uk), you work within a document-style interface, so your work is ready to publish/present. The latest version (10) will now run on new Apple Macintosh models with Intel Core processors. Unveiled earlier this year, the new Intel chips allow Mac users to compute with increased speed and agility. The Macintosh platform maintenance update (10.04) also delivers a number of significant improvements for people running Maple 10 on Windows, Linux and Unix. Maple users operating on the Intel-based Mac platform will benefit from significantly reduced start-up times, improved speed of rendering 2D mathematics, and 3D plot manipulation that is both faster and smoother.
Wolfram Research (www.wolfram.com) has just released webMathematica 2.3, which takes advantage of the latest web development options and performance improvements in Mathematica 5.2 to expand the size and scope of scientific problems that can reliably be tackled on web sites. Like Maple, Mathematica is a full mathematical computation system with a document-style interface for the presentation of results. Features include 64-bit numerics, multithreading support for numerical linear algebra and significantly faster vectorisation. So, computations that can be done in Mathematica can now also be accomplished on the web, including the most demanding large-scale problems and simulations. Each task is handled directly on the server, so visitors to a webMathematica site never need any special software or knowledge of Mathematica to access its functionality.
Incidentally, if you are a Mathematica user, there's an excellent simulation tool from Milo Hedge (www.milohedge.com) that can be combined with the mathematical package to provide startlingly realistic objects with proper lighting and smooth shading effects. According to the supplier, the only thing you cannot do with Mathlive Professional is put your hand into the screen and grasp the simulation - yet!
Mathcad from Mathsoft (http://mathcad.adeptscience.co.uk) - another document-centred product currently in version 13 - has been voted 'Product of the Year' by readers of Desktop Engineering magazine. Mathsoft says that more than 1.8 million individuals use Mathcad, which integrates standard mathematical notation, text and plots in a single worksheet - a boon to collaborative work routines among teams of design engineers. Moreover, Mathcad's open application architecture, combined with its support of .NET and its native XML format make it easy to integrate the package into existing IT structures and other engineering applications. Mathcad gives you 2D and 3D plots, including Cartesian, polar, surface, contour, bar, scatter and vector-field.
One of the longest standing mathematical software products is UTS' (www.uts.com) TK Solver - currently in version 5.0. This gives you a rule-based, declarative method of setting up problems, which doesn't require you to decide what variables will be inputs and which will be outputs when setting up the mathematical model. UTS says this can speed up the preparation process by as much as 90%. Another useful feature is the ability to use guess values to 'back-solve' a problem, making it an ideal tool for testing 'what if' scenarios. The package can handle thousands of simultaneous linear and non-linear equations, so you don't need to construct matrices or make trial-and-error calculations. Just give TK Solver your best guess and it will use its built-in iterative solver to find the answer.
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