MATLAB is a numerical computing environment and programming language. It is a commercial software owned by\u00a0MathWorks, and is widely used in teaching and research. Although MATLAB has a campus agreement which grants\u00a0the University unlimited usage of the core MATLAB product and a limited selection of toolboxes, the yearly\u00a0subscription costs in excess of \u00a3100k.
\nIn this scenario, we are investigating potential alternatives to MATLAB in terms of functionality and cost. There is a\u00a0great variety of mathematical modelling software on the market. Initially we identified a list of more than 20 products\u00a0including Python, R, SciPy and other variations of these. We shortlisted four major products based on the product\u00a0features, popularity, maturity and support availability. These four alternative products are GNU Octave, Scilab,\u00a0Mathematica and Julia. This paper will provide a brief introduction to each product, and compare it to MATLAB in\u00a0terms of the licensing model, compatibility, programming language syntax, toolbox availability, platform differences\u00a0and support level.<\/p>\n
Finally, we have evaluated each of these products\u2019 advantages and disadvantages. Based on our evaluation, we\u00a0conclude that it might be possible to replace MATLAB\u2019s core functions with GNU Octave, Scilab, Mathematica and\u00a0Julia. However, to replicate all the functions (including the toolboxes that MATLAB provides) would require users to\u00a0use a combination of these alternative products. Moreover, it would force users to learn to use different products,\u00a0which would require a lot of effort, potentially affecting the effectiveness of their research output.<\/p>\n
Read the full report<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" MATLAB is a numerical computing environment and programming language. It is a commercial software owned by\u00a0MathWorks, and is widely used in teaching and research. Although MATLAB has a campus agreement which grants\u00a0the University unlimited usage of the core MATLAB product and a limited selection of toolboxes, the yearly\u00a0subscription costs in excess of \u00a3100k. In this … Continue reading “An Overview of MATLAB and other mathematics modelling tools”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":96,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-productivity-tools","category-projects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/96"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":220,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions\/220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itinnovation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}