I am a mature, 38, student studying mathematics with the Open University in the UK. I have started exploring mathematical concepts with computing and currently got round to doing some tinkering with other languages, mainly python.
To be honest I stumbled across Julia in the Ubuntu repositories and it seemed like it would be useful in my mathematical explorations. Especially if graphing and any other graphical representations are made easier.
Anyway, I am going to check out some tutorials and hopefully spend some time in the forums trying to learn and see if this is something that can aid in my studies.
Just a heads up, but we normally recommend installing an official binary. This is because Julia uses patched versions of many libraries.
Julia provided by linux package managers tends to be broken.
Welcome! Julia is wonderful for math. But plotting is not one of the core utilities of the language, so whether it is easier or not, will depend on the specific area of maths you are working in. Maybe there is a dedicated package for that with plotting utilities that will serve your purposes. Can you link some example of plots you are looking for?
For “general plotting”, I’d say that if you already know matplotlib (python), Julia does not provide substantially easier solutions.
First on the install; I am getting a new ssd today so I will be doing a fresh install of Mint so I will grab the Linux binaries and make sure that I use it from the site rather than the repository.
As for the commynity; I will probably end up using the forums because I study most of the time so live chats I kinda end up missing.
@heliosdrm I suppose when I say plotting I mean more complex plotting. So for example I want to make a graph of how long it takes certain numbers to hit 1 for the Collatz Conjecture. While I have made programs in Python, when it gets to some large integers it can take a while to run the algorithm. So if I can do it all in one language then it makes my exploration of these things easier.
That sounds like a great use case for Julia! Note that it can take some practice to make your Julia code as fast as possible, so feel free to post here with questions if your code isn’t as fast as you expect.
@rdeits One of the things I need to figure out is working with large primes for exploring Mersenne primes. I tried to do it like I would in, say python but ran into a overflow (not had to say that since the C64 BASIC days) where it wrapped back to zero. So when I feel ready I will post that to the appropriate forum section.
– Ignore that I figured it out. I had to use BigInt() Helps if I read the manual.
@mcreel Thank you for the link. I will be sure to give that a look over as soon as I get my laptop sorted. I am just in the process of fitting a new SSD and getting linux installed. Maybe I should install Jupyter notebooks as this is what people seem to be using now.
I have been experimenting with Julia all afternoon and I like the way it works. It hasn’t taken much effort to switch my brain into working with it from Python. So I happy from that perspective. It is also a lot quicker at larger calculations than Python (that is no to say Python is bad, but I may have found the language for when I need to do massive calculations.)
Julia also works great on this rescued laptop. It was going to be thrown out by someone on the same street and I said if it works why get rid of it (e-waste). Even on the Celleron processor it is snappy.
Helps if I read the manual.