* Manuel M T Chakravarty
Indeed, a matrix library would be really nice. Before getting serious about this, please take a very close look at how PETSc (http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/) handles matrices. The abstraction is very important because most large matrices of interest are sparse or have some symmetry that makes them asymptotically cheaper to apply (like with an FFT, FMM, or tensor product).
In my experience, it is a lot harder to get somebody who is motivated to write a general-purpose library than getting somebody who is motivated to write an application, which you can run and show to people at the end.
You're absolutely right from my (i.e. student's) point of view :) -- Roman I. Cheplyaka :: http://ro-che.info/ ...being in love is totally punk rock...