, and boy is it cool --and runs on all platforms. It's very compact, so it takes a little while to get used to the syntax and structure, but after that R is justifiably a very popular stat/math package. Check it out at R project .
April 2008: I finally got around to installing , and boy is it cool --and runs on all platforms. It's very compact, so it takes a little while to get used to the syntax and structure, but after that R is justifiably a very popular stat/math package. Check it out at R project .
A few little toys I wrote are at rtools By the way, I got "clplot" accepted into the Plotrix package. Check it out!
With LabView available for OSX (but watch to be sure the PCI cards you want/need are compatible), and both MatLab and the free alternative, Octave available for OSX, things are looking good. Note: I haven't figured out exactly how to install Octave and the necessary parts of Fink, but it can't be that hard :-).
The sourceforge goodie FreeMat works nicely as well.
I tripped across a great little freeware tool: Equato will solve groups of equations regardless of which subset of variables you define. Simple examples include extracting polynomial roots or solving systems of linear equations. It's written by one of the originators of TKSolver, which BTW is a fantastic tool but available only in Windows versions.
A little toy to do data acquisition and analysis is Graphical Analysis
Be sure to pick up Regress+ which is a freeware regression tool. It does data fitting to linear and polynomial and any arbitrary equation you select. In addition Mike McLaughlin supplies a very detailed manual on regression analysis and techniques.
There are two very cute freeware tools, DataThief and PlotDigitizer which let you mark points on any image (like, say, a graph you found somewhere) and produce a set of cartesian or polar coordinates for the data you chose. Unfortunately these are OS9 , but they run fine. One of them, sorry I forget which, can "trace" a specified color, so if you have a picture with a data curve of a signficantly different color from the background, it'll get the points for you.
There is, BTW, a SourceForge project called "Engauge," which now has been ported to OSX. There's also QuickTrace which may not run well on new OSs, given that it hasn't been updated in years.
Apple itself has a nice list of calculators and various advanced math and stats tools, at math_science
I need to do some new surveys to see what other freeware and shareware tools have popped up. "Coming soon"