Interactive Systems for Experimental Applied Mathematics

Book excerpt: Interactive Systems for Experimental Applied Mathematics is a collection of papers presented at the 1967 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Inc. Symposium on Interactive Systems for Experimental Mathematics, held in Washington, D.C. in conjunction with the ACM National Meeting. This book is organized into five parts encompassing 46 chapters. The opening part deals with the general criteria for interactive on-line systems that seem most important for the experimental solution of mathematical problems. This part specifically describes the AMTRAN, REDUCE, EASL, POSE, VENUS, and CHARYBDIS computer systems and languages. The next two parts cover the components of interactive systems, including coherent programming, interactive console, mathematical symbol processing, message system, and computer-aided instruction. The fourth part examines a scheme for permitting a user of conventional procedural programming languages, namely, FORTRAN, to test actual error propagation in numerical calculations. This part also describes the features of Analyst Assistance Program, an on-line graphically oriented conversational computing system designed to perform small nonrecurring numerical computations. The concluding part presents several implications of selected computer systems, the resulting problems, and their proposed solutions. This book is of great benefit to computer scientists and engineers, mathematicians, and undergraduate and graduate students in applied mathematics.