another FSF survey

[David Hough]

Date: Fri, 4 Nov 94 01:29:10 EST
From: rajaagnu.ai.mit.edu
Subject: Project GNU Math Survey

We would like to thank the 400+ respondents to our survey of mathematical
and statistical software used and desired by mathematicians and scientists. 
Project GNU of the Free Software Foundation posted this survey to several
special-interest Newsgroups in July of this year. We were quite pleased (if
somewhat overwhelmed!) by the volume of interest, and the number of responses.

We also want to apologize for the length of time it has taken to analyze the
responses, and to, in turn, present this reply to you. 

While the material gathered was quite interesting, the most important item
learned from the survey was that we need to ask the question a little
better. So, with your indulgence, here are some statistics from the July
Survey, followed by a second Survey we would like you to consider:


 From the 400 messages received in response to the GNU Math Survey #1,
these mathematical packages (both free and commercial) were mentioned as
being used by the indicated percentage of respondents:

matlab          34%
mathematica     32%
gnuplot         28%
maple           27%
octave          17%
nag             17%
lapack          14%
imsl            12%
linpack          8%
eispack          5%
blas             5%
spss             4%
  

===================================================

Most of the respondents replied to what free mathematical software was most
desired.  The kinds of software, and the number of persons indicating each are:

- graph/plot/contour/data_massaging 2D and 3D (76)
- symbolic computation (65)
- lin. algebra + num. analysis (C/C++) (52)
- matlab equiv. (34)
- stat package (26)
- Fortran 77/90 (25)
- optimization (16)
- imsl/nag (14)
- FEM (8)

... and lots of also-rans.


===================================================
GNU Math Software Survey #2:   

This is our second try at asking about what numerical software people
need.  From our first try, we learned how to ask the question better
:-).

The GNU project wants to put together a collection of free software
for widely useful numerical computations.  We need to make up a task
list saying which routines this collection needs to have.
We'd like your help in deciding what to put in this.

If you use software packages that do standard numerical calculations, what
precisely are the standard calculations you use?  That is, looking at just
the routines you actually use, what jobs do they do?

We're looking for brief but specific answers, like these made-up
examples:

* "Find a root of an arbitrary real-valued function of a real
argument, given a black box that computes the function."

* "Find the eigenvalues of a Hermitian matrix up to 100x100 in size."

* "Least-squares fit of an Nth degree polynomial in up to 5 variables.
We use up to 10,000 data points, each of which can have any arbitrary
values of those 5 independent variables."

If you use subroutines from a collection such as NAG or IMSL, please
answer describing the particular routines from the collection you
actually use.  A general answer such as "we use IMSL" doesn't give us
specific guidance.

Please don't include free packages such as Octave and Gnuplot in your
answer.  Since there is already free software for those jobs, we don't
need to them in our task list.

Please don't include symbolic algebra programs in your answer.
Symbolic algebra programs are very important, but they are a different
category of software.  Here we are asking about the more traditional
numerical calculations--the first thing people imagined computers were
for.

(The GNU project has a symbolic algebra program, JaCaL; while still
lacking many important features, it is usable for some purposes.)


Please send your replies to our survey to:


math-sw-surveyagnu.ai.mit.edu

Thank you!