A computational evaluation of some free mathematical software for scientific computing

The purpose of this paper is to present a computational comparison of some well-known free mathematical programs. Specifically, these programs are FreeMat, Mathnium, Octave, R and Scilab. All these programs are designed in order to be used either in the scientific community or the industry. Moreover, an additional aim of this paper is to propose open source alternative software which can replace commercial mathematical software. Several issues concerning available operating system platforms, data structures, languages’ structure, matrix operations, program modularization, libraries, packages, profiling tools and online help facilities are addressed in this paper. Discussions on their weaknesses and strengths characteristics are presented. Finally, a speed comparison of some frequently used algorithms, procedures and operations within software is also presented.