The 61st Carnival of Mathematics will be hosted here on 1st January 2010 so please head over to the carnival submissions page and help make 2010 start with a mathematical bang.  For an idea of what the carnivals look like check out the 60th over at...

It’s been a great week for Open Source maths software this week with new releases of both Maxima and Scilab. Maxima is a computer algebra system written in lisp that runs on most operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.  The latest...

One of my plans for next year is to start giving short talks and tutorials about scientific Python to various groups around the University of Manchester.  Ever since I attended EuroSciPy in Leipzig earlier this year I have been excited about the...

Maplesoft have been getting into the Christmas spirit recently with a few festive demonstrations. The first uses MapleSim (essentially Maple’s answer to Simulink) to simulate Santa in flight.  Of course it is highly simplified since, among other...

Earlier this month I had a query from a colleague who had installed MATLAB on some very large and powerful workstations which are used by many researchers at our University. This colleague is a sysadmin of the old school and he doesn’t like installing...