Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for Physicists

On Wed, 30/Sep/2009 at 22:27 +0200, Max Rabkin wrote:

I am *not* a physicist, but I imagine many physicists know at least something of functional analysis, algebra, Lie algebras, etc.

However, when physicists write programs (this is my inference from the widespread use of Fortran and the computational assignments given to undergraduate students) they are almost exclusively numerical: very often evaluating some integrals or integrating a system of differential equations. Although Haskell can do these things, it's not a place where Haskell really shines (compared to symbolic computation).

Well, if you want to write all the code in Haskell, maybe this is true (some parts an imperative code still is the most efficient, but nothing that you can't do in C and use in Haskell via FFI). But in my case, Haskell really shined using as an interface to GSL/Lapack via the wonderful hmatrix lib.

Since I'm not a physicist, I can't give a good example, but think more of the things Mathematica is good for, rather than Fortran or Matlab. My impression is that Haskell's advantage over Mathematica is in its generality: Mathematica is great if it has a builtin function to do what you want, but it's not a very pleasant programming language.

And speed is other advantage! The code that I wrote to solve a problem in bose condensation is dozen times fastest that the Mathematica equivalent, and much more clean and simple to expand or modify. Edgar

HTH, Max

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 9:39 PM, Khudyakov Alexey wrote:

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В сообщении от Среда 30 сентября 2009 23:29:32 Max Rabkin написал:

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On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 9:24 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:

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Haskell: mathematics beyond numerical calculus

I'd imagine most physicists know a fair bit of mathematics beyond numerical calculus; what they might not know much about is *computation* beyond numerical calculus.

Could you elaborate this. As physicist I don't quite get it.

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