[Haskell-cafe] Numerical methods in Haskell

[Henning Thielemann]

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:

> | Between google searching and looking through the activity
> | report, I take it that no one has really developed serious
> | libraries for matrix manipulations, diff eqs, etc.
> |
> | Are there any practical reasons for this or is it just a
> | matter of the haskell community being small and there not
> | being many people interested in something so specialized?
>
> The latter I think, but it's just the sort of thing that a functional
> language should be good at.

Yes, I think lazy functional languages are great for this job! Languages
of which other kind can represent power series and (infinite) sequences so
easily?

> (a) It's hard to compete with existing libraries.  The obvious thing is
> not to compete; instead, just call them.  But somehow that doesn't seem
> to be as motivating.  Perhaps some bindings exist though?

I collected the efforts of matrix libraries seen so far:
 http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/LinearAlgebra

> I'd love to see a little community of matrix manipulators spinning up.

Here, here, here! :-)

I wrote some little, really very basic modules for me for numerical
integration, solving differential equations, approximation with Newton's
method and Co., power series manipulation, wrapping GNUPlot for display of
numerical data. Due to increasing interest I could make the repository
public, but I can't guarantee for a stable interface.

Jerzy Karczmarczuk gives a fine overview over how functional lazy
languages assist solving mathematical problems:
 http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2004-May/006197.html