GNU Octave

GNU Octave is a high-level programming language and interactive environment, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically and for running other numerical experiments, using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language, and it can be extended through user-defined functions written in Octave's own language or through dynamically loaded modules written in C++, C, Fortran or other languages. According to the project's own history, Octave was conceived in about 1988 as companion software for an undergraduate textbook on chemical reactor design being written by James B. Rawlings of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and John G. Ekerdt of the University of Texas. The authors then chose to build a more flexible tool, full-time development began in the spring of 1992, the first alpha release came on January 4, 1993 and version 1.0 followed on February 17, 1994. Octave was written by John W. Eaton and many others and is free software distributed under the GNU General Public License. Its name does not refer to music but to Octave Levenspiel, a former professor of one of the authors and the author of a well known textbook on chemical reaction engineering.