Previously in this space, I have covered software packages like Maxima that can be used to solve symbolic mathematics problems. Several packages are available that can do those types of calculations. In this article, I discuss Xcas/Giac. Xcas is the GUI interface to the system.

More and more journals are demanding that the science being published be reproducible. Ideally, if you publish your code, that should be enough for someone else to reproduce the results you are claiming. But, anyone who has done any actual computational science knows that this is not true.

I have covered a lot of different scientific packages that are available under Linux in this space, but the focus has been on Linux running on desktop machines. This has been rather short-sighted, however, as lots of other platforms have Linux available and shouldn't be neglected. So in this article, I start looking at the type of science you can do on the Android platform.

One of the common classes of equations that is encountered in several branches of science is partial differential equations. So in this article, I look at a software package called FreeFem++ that is designed to help you calculate these partial differential equations.

One of the things that makes Python so powerful is that you can find a module for almost anything. In this article, I cover Astropy, which was originally developed by the Space Telescope Science Institute for doing astronomy calculations like image processing and observatory calculations.

I have covered several different software packages for doing scientific computation in Linux Journal, but I haven't spent as much time describing available libraries and the kind of work that can be done with those libraries.

CERN is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. It has been in the news quite a bit lately with the discovery of the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider. Something that many people may not know is that it also has a long tradition of developing software for scientific use.

For any object moving through a fluid, forces are applied to the object as the fluid moves around it. A fluid can be something like water, or even something like the air around us. When the object is specifically designed to maximize the forces that the fluid can apply, you can designate these designs as airfoils. A more common name that most people would use is a wing.

Many problems in science and engineering are modeled through ordinary differential equations (ODEs). An ODE is an equation that contains a function of one independent variable and its derivatives.

I've looked at specialty distributions that were created for engineers and biologists in previous articles, but these aren't the only scientific disciplines that have their own distributions. So in this article, I introduce a distribution created specifically for astronomers, called Distro Astro.

3-D printers are becoming popular tools, dropping in price and becoming available to almost everyone. They can be used to build parts that you can use around the house, but more and more, they also are being used to create instruments for scientific work.

I've covered a lot of various pieces of software that are designed to help you do scientific calculations of one type or another, but I have neglected a whole class of computational tools that is rarely used anymore. Before there was the electronic computer, computations had to be made by hand, so they were error-prone.

In the past, I've covered various astronomy packages that help you explore the universe of deep space. But, space starts a lot closer to home. It actually begins a few hundred miles above your head. There are lots of things in orbit right above you.

Vibrations and wave motions describe many different physical systems. In fact, most systems that dissipate energy do so through waves of one form or another. In this article, I take a look at gvb (Good ViBrations, http://www.pietrobattiston.it/gvb), a Linux application you can use to visualize and model wave motion and vibrations.

As I write this, NASA has just passed another milestone in releasing its work to the Open Source community. A press release came out announcing the release on April 10, 2014, of a new catalog of NASA software that is available as open source. This new catalog includes both older software that was previously available, along with new software being released for the first time.

In my last few articles, I looked at several different Python modules that are useful for doing computations. But, what tools are available to help you analyze the results from those computations? Although you could do some statistical analysis, sometimes the best tool is a graphical representation of the results.

In my last article, I looked at NumPY and some of its uses in numerical simulations. Although NumPY does provide some really robust building blocks, it is a bit lacking in more sophisticated tools. SciPY is one of the many Python modules that build on NumPY's.

For the past few months, I've been covering different software packages for scientific computations. For my next several articles, I'm going to be focusing on using Python to come up with your own algorithms for your scientific problems.

In past articles, I have looked at distributions that were built with some scientific discipline in mind. In this article, I take a look at yet another one. In this case, I cover what is provided by NeuroDebian.

Fractals are one of the weirder things you may come across when studying computer science and programming algorithms.