Clients are starting to shovel data at me in Matlab/Mathematica/Mathcad formats.
Can some regular users guide me in choosing which to purchase?
Thanks!
...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |
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| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Excels at matrix-based numerical computation. Will crunch through large data sets easily. Lots of specialized toolboxes (cost extra unfortunately) for things like signal processing, financial operations, neural networks, etc. They've integrated Maple's symbolic computation abilities as a separate toolbox so you can (kinda) do symbolic integration, etc. as well as numerical computation, but the latter is really where it excels. Matlab has several clones (Scilab, Octave being the ones that come to mind first...both are Open Source) but IMHO Matlab is superior enough to actually be worth purchasing.
2) Mathematica
Excels at symbolic computation. Steep learning curve. Others can fill in more details.
3) MathCad
Dreck.
Does symbolic computation like Mathematica, but not nearly as well nor as extensively. Does numeric computation like Matlab, but not nearly as well (just try importing a 50000-element vector from a text file...I dare you) nor as extensively.
Mostly, it's a toy meant for educational use (which it is suitable for...mostly, though it tends to make students lazy such that they will fire up MathCad to solve a linear equation in 1 unknown...pathetic).
When was the last time you used MathCad? I've never used Mathematica, but I've been using MathCad for years, for computations far more serious than solving 1st-order linear equations, and it works pretty well for me.
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Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com
MathCad and MatLab use two markedly different formats, once you go beyond comma-delimited files to store arrays they are totally incompatible. I haven't used Mathematica so I can't comment on it.
Chuck's suggestion was spot-on: I started using Octave when I started the business, with the intention of buying Matlab when I had to.
I'm still waiting.
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Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com
As others have mentioned, Mathematica does have a steep learning curve, but excels at symbolic mathematics. It's also extensible into pretty much any realm you want.
There are also free Mathematica notebook readers available from Wolfram, so if all you need to do is read and print, that's the way to go.
MathCad (and I would hope Mathematica) is what a spreadsheet should be. You define functions & variables in a freeform manner, interspersed with comments where applicable and graphs where needed to illustrate your points, and the tool takes care of all the computations. I use MatLab (well, Octave or SciLab) for heavy number crunching, but for real math I use MathCad.
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Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com
I'll second Octave, but, again, the input language isn't exactly the same as Matlab. If you have hundreds of files to parse, this may be an issue.
Also, I found it a bit tricky to get gnuplot working with it under windows for some reason. Gmuplot is used to do any plotting of results. My desire to use it to study digital filters was one factor that prompted a recent move from XP back to Linux.
This probably doesn't work for Jim, but educatoinal use versions of Matlab are cheap -- something like $99... although you don't get any of the various toolkits with it.
I think Matlab is great, but the full version really is spendy -- many thousands of dollars!
No it's not! MathCAD is certainly limited relative to Matlab (or anything else :-) ), but it's often the fastest way to just "mess around" with some data and graphs. As soon as you need to write some reasonably programmatic functions, though, it becomes somewhat painful and Matlab is often the better choice.
Meant for educational use... mmmm, yeah, I suppose. A toy? No. It's used everyday by folks doing Real Engineering Work, including the likes of Hans Camenzind (inventor of the 555).
MathCAD is quite cheap relative to the rest...
It is pathetic, but I'd have to say it's often due to the students never being required to learn how to do it by themselves. Technology is so complicated these days that you want to ask students to do things like solve very difficult differential equations, build fancy convolutional encoders, perform FFTs, etc., and there's no time (and often no reason) to teach them the mechanics of doing so themselves, so instead you teach them how to solve the problems using readily available tools.
The disservice occurs when students are "given" (meaning, "required to learn!") so few "core" tools that they end up being helpless if they don't have a perfectly round hole for their round pegs. This happens at the lower (high school) levels where the emphasis is all on passing some standardized tests rather than actually learning what's going on.
That's an easy one, Octave. It's free, it runs under Linux and 'doze, and does a nice jobe of emulating Matlab. There are some slight differences, but no show stoppers. The author is trying to eliminate as many of those differences as possible.
Well, tastes differ. Below there are some my observations about Mathematica.
I have been working with Mathematica for the last 5 years and I like it.
1) Fast symbolic calculation and since Mathematica 5.0 fast numerics as well. Now numerical linear algebra is done with the same speed as in Matlab.
2) A very consistent functional programming language. I should say that functional programming is very important feature for scientific computing.
3) A nice working environment. A project is a single file, so called a notebook. You can even find books written within Mathematica.
4) webMathematica gives you a smooth transition to the Web.
We have a collection of functions in Mathematica related to MEMS simulation, you may have a look
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If to speak about free tools, I think Python is not bad. There are many add-ons to Python for scientific computing now.
Hello, and hey! I still use my ancient MathCad 6.0 Pro (it runs fine under Win XP) for electronics engineering work. It easily handles matrix algebra with complex numbers as matrix elements. I've also included MathCad pages containing text and formulas as-is into technical reports. As stated above you can easily "mess around" with MathCad much in the same way as you would a handheld scientific calculator or a spreadsheet. You can put MathCad away for several months or longer and pick right back up on it without significant relearning. Again, I'm speaking about my antique version. My .02 worth. Sincerely,
John Wood (Code 5550) e-mail: snipped-for-privacy@itd.nrl.navy.mil Naval Research Laboratory
4555 Overlook Avenue, SW Washington, DC 20375-5337
Yes, but Python is a general purpose programming language. I really doubt that we will be turning Jim Thompson into a Programming Wonk in this lifetime.
Scilab is an excellent program, but I don't like the terms. They only offer the free license to non commercial entities. That leaves consultants out in the cold. They want something like $500 for the license for commercial use. Might just as well use Matlab and Mathematica. At least with them, there is a paid staff to provide maintenance.
I'll continue to use Octave. It is a very powerful, and well done program. And, the price is right.
It should all be ASCII- or if not, easily converted to that format by whatever package generated it. MATLAB is an institutional package, they make lots of money, the license must be renewed each year at a cost nearly equal to the original purchase price- and there is no question MathWorks has the largest engineering and applied science user base- by orders of magnitude- the largest applications code available for download, contributed by users, and the largest number of excellent applications specialized textbook/handbook support, and lots of free applications seminars nationwide. Give it time, and they will have PSPICE as a ToolBox, they have already done this with larger targets.
Hi Jim: FWIW, I have used Mathematica, Matlab, and Octave. I like Mathmatica for symbolic manipulation/solutions of equations. It has (in my opinion) a steeper learning curve than Matlab/Octave. I have not used Mathcad. Being an engineer who does ckt design as well as control systems engineering, as well as signal and image processing, I like Matlab. The toolboxes contain all the functions that can be applied to heavy duty applications. The programming paradigm in basic Matlab carries over directly to the toolboxes. If interfacing to the realworld for realtime analysis (signal processing and control), Matlab does a very good job. From my usage, Octave is very similar to Matlab in the analysis portion, but I never tried to use it in a real-time mode. I must admit, it is great for the price.
There is another tool that I really like, and depending on your needs, may be a better fit. Its IDL. IDL is: a mathematical analysis library (similar to matlab in both programming paradigm and functionality), programming language, and the ability to embed/integrate your analysis programs into your application for very good time response. IDL has been around for a long time, has good support, and runs on MANY operating systems (WinX, Linux, UNIX, VMS) and you can develop GUIs/applications that are truly portable (X, Win, web). If a function you need is not in it, or, you want to craft a display, or interface to a DAS, you can write your own functions to do it...there is also a user area that ppl contribute their functions. It does cost a bit (don't recall, its been a while since I bought it but, it can be cost competitive with Matlab..
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Good luck John
Jim Thomps> Clients are starting to shovel data at me in
Hi Jim, Mathcad got me through grad school, so I have to recommend it, although that was (mumble) years ago, and the program has changed quite a bit since then.
Pluses: WYSIWYG interface, so nice for equations and such, decent import/export capabilities.
Minuses: Learning the user interface (Oh, you have to enter the limits for the integration... Here, not there, OK, so, why do I have that little box there?...)
Mathematica is the most advanced symbolics package available.
There was a time when I was learning to analyze circuits, by writing the time domain differential equations. I wrote out the whole system equations for a full wave bridge rectifier including transformer inductance, diode models, ESR of the filter caps, and the filter C. Mathematica could solve this system (numerically), but Maple couldn't even deal with the equations. Ultimately I discovered that SPICE was much more effective at solving these sorts of things due to being optimized for this form of system. But it was very educational to solve the equations in a general purpose math package.
The ability to combine symbolics with numerics makes it much more useful to me than Matlab, since I am often seeking to avoid pages of tedious algebra in deriving some relation. But then I wish to immediately apply my new function to data or generate data, which it can do as well.
Good day!
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