Mike Croucher works as a science and engineering applications support specialist at the University of Manchester. He asked us for help publicising a Kickstarter project to port Octave to Android, so we thought the best way to do that was to ask him to explain what it’s about himself.
Smartphones and tablets are becoming ubiquitous and they are surprisingly powerful little computing devices. Although you may primarily use your mobile phone to play Angry Birds, catch up on Facebook or text your friends, many of them have computational power on par with Cray supercomputers of the past.
One thing these devices are lacking, however, is an easy to use, general purpose mathematical language. Something like MATLAB would be ideal since the MATLAB language is taught to mathematicians, engineers and scientists all over the world but it is highly unlikely that The Mathworks will port MATLAB to Android (one of the main smartphone operating systems) any time soon.
A great alternative to MATLAB is the free, open-source MATLAB equivalent, Octave, which is sufficiently well developed that it can often run MATLAB scripts with little or no modifications. Octave can run on many different systems including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X but, until recently, not on smartphone operating systems such as Android. Corbin Champion, a software developer from the US, is changing that.
Corbin has already released a free, proof of concept Android app called Addi that allows you to run the Octave interpreter on Android devices. It’s very limited at the moment but it demonstrates that Corbin knows his stuff and is serious about the project. Corbin would like to devote a significant amount of time to working on this project and has launched a kickstarter project in order to try and obtain funding from the worldwide community.
At the time of writing, the project has attracted almost 1,500 dollars of funding pledges but needs 50,000 dollars in order to go ahead. If Corbin’s funding drive is successful, he’ll soon provide us all with a superb, free mathematical resource. Donations start from as little as $1 so head over and pledge your support.
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Anrdoid should be Android.
Oops! Thanks for that.