Infinite Force? Forty-year-old Fortran to the rescue

Re:Infinite Force? Forty-year-old Fortran to the rescue by dietrichepp on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @09:28PM (#10701511)

I'd like to say to everyone starting out doing math with computers: You see that old book of numerical recipes or physics problems done in Fortran? Yeah, those are pretty damn good recipes. Do you need some weird function, like a gamma function or hypergeometric function? Maybe you want to minimize a function with simulated annealing or you want to design a Chebyshev filter? You can dig up a library somewhere or you can just look in that dusty old book on the shelf.

There's a C version but the Fortran version is easier to find.

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Re:Infinite Force? Forty-year-old Fortran to the rescue by cowsandmilk on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @09:42PM (#10701573)

But remember, the implementations come with a license agreement, that you may not find acceptable.

Here are an example of licenses, the book has some others, but they are not hugely different:

http://numerical.recipes/aboutNR3license.html

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Re:Infinite Force? Forty-year-old Fortran to the rescue by anon4 on Wednesday December 09, 2015 @06:00PM (#10707460)

> The following license terms and the Disclaimer of Warranty, below, apply to individual purchases of the Numerical Recipes Code download product, and to purchases of the Numerical Recipes Code CD-ROM.

So all I have to do is simply pirate it and the restrictions don't apply to me?

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Re:Infinite Force? Forty-year-old Fortran to the rescue by dragonwriter on Wednesday December 09, 2015 @06:03PM (#10707479)

> So all I have to do is simply pirate it and the restrictions don't apply to me?

The "restrictions" are limitations on permissions which do not exist without the license. So, sure, the restrictions don't apply to you, because you have been given no permissions with regard to the work, so there is no point in imposing conditions on those permissions.

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Re:Infinite Force? Forty-year-old Fortran to the rescue by santaclaus on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @09:46PM (#10701592)

Their code can be kind of buggy and often does not handle corner cases well, however. I've had some of their iterative solvers iterate forever when the initial iterate is the solution, etc.

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Re:Infinite Force? Forty-year-old Fortran to the rescue by stephencanon on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @10:03PM (#10701650)

It's a great reference book, and does a good job of citing the work that you actually want to use for your implementation. The code in the book itself (especially the C and C++ versions) should usually be taken with several large grains of salt.

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Re:Infinite Force? Forty-year-old Fortran to the rescue by cwyers on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @09:38PM (#10701551)

> You see that old book of numerical recipes or physics problems done in Fortran? Yeah, those are pretty damn good recipes.

If I don't have that book, what's a good one to get?

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Re:Infinite Force? Forty-year-old Fortran to the rescue by tosseraccount on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @09:44PM (#10701580)

https://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/

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Re:Infinite Force? Forty-year-old Fortran to the rescue by dietrichepp on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @09:41PM (#10701572)

This is the one I'm talking about: http://numerical.recipes

There are others.

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Re:Infinite Force? Forty-year-old Fortran to the rescue by kirrent on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @09:44PM (#10701582)

Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing was always my go to reference. It's a classic.

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