[PYTHON MATRIX-SIG] Numerical Recipes

[Konrad Hinsen]

> Taking a set of functional numerical software and creating a functional
> interface to it is IMHO not a good choice, although it may be easy for Python
> considering the power of the language and the various automatic tools such as
> FIDL and SWIG.

But having an automatically generated low-level Python interface makes
it a lot easier to implement the "real" interface that users will see,
just as for LAPACK.

> therefore does not endorse either. However, LLNL has a strong interest in the
> creation of numerical facilities for Python and I would be glad to confer
> with anyone beginning such a task.

Now that the low-level stuff is coming to a first final point, maybe
we should use this mailing list to discuss exactly such things.  I see
the main problem in the huge to-do list; there are just too many
numerical methods out there that ought to be implemented.

Something I have started on myself is implementing the concept of a
function (in the mathematical/numerical sense). My idea was to have
different types of function objects (polynomials, interpolated
functions, splines...) that have, as far as possible, the same
interface.  I did implement those that I needed, which is
interpolating functions (i.e. functions defined by a grid of values
with linear interpolation) and polynomials.  Both types support
evaluation (obvious), differentiation, and integration.  Interpolating
functions also have subrange extraction and polynomial fit (which, of
course, returns a polynomial function). Of course there remains
a lot to be done.

Other fields I expect to be useful for my own work are:
- linear algebra (i.e. real matrix objects, including variants
  for symmetric matrices etc.)
- ordinary differential equations
- data analysis/statistics

Certainly others will have different preferences. We might in fact
need several mailing lists...

Konrad.
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Konrad Hinsen                          | E-Mail: hinsen@ibs.ibs.fr
Laboratoire de Dynamique Moleculaire   | Tel.: +33-76.88.99.28
Institut de Biologie Structurale       | Fax:  +33-76.88.54.94
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