MatLab

MatLab is a commerical package whose name is an abbreviation of Matrix Laboratory. Its strengths are thus in linear algebra and numerics, whereas Mathematica is the better product for symbolic algebra. Like Mathematica, MatLab is programmable. It can be extended by many `toolboxes', which are extra cost options.

Completely free alternatives to Matlab include Gnu's Octave, which is designed to be mostly Matlab compatible, and python with NumPy and MatPlotLib, which is not at all Matlab compatible but provides some of its functionality.

From November 2018 the University has a site licence for Matlab and all of its toolboxes (previously a subset of the University had access to a subset of the toolboxes). The licence also covers use on home machines for "University/College staff and students," or maybe "all faculty, researchers, and students" or maybe "everyone at the University of Cambridge." One hopes that Matlab itself can provide a greater degree of precision and consistency in its numeric calculations.

MathWorks has a dedicated Cambridge download page. There may also be disk images to be found in /rscratch/ISOs/ if this is more convenient than downloading from MathWorks.

TCM does not currently (Nov 2018) install all possible toolboxes - if one is missing that you wish to use, do let [email protected] know.

(And as with all licenced software in TCM, if TCM's licence is threatening to expire / has expired, do let [email protected] know -- we might not have noticed.)