octave: Preface
Preface
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Octave was originally intended to be companion software for an
undergraduate-level textbook on chemical reactor design being written by
James B. Rawlings of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and John G.
Ekerdt of the University of Texas.
Clearly, Octave is now much more than just another ‘courseware’
package with limited utility beyond the classroom. Although our initial
goals were somewhat vague, we knew that we wanted to create something
that would enable students to solve realistic problems, and that they
could use for many things other than chemical reactor design problems.
We find that most students pick up the basics of Octave quickly, and are
using it confidently in just a few hours.
Although it was originally intended to be used to teach reactor
design, it has been used in several other undergraduate and graduate
courses in the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of
Texas, and the math department at the University of Texas has been using
it for teaching differential equations and linear algebra as well. More
recently, Octave has been used as the primary computational tool for
teaching Stanford’s online Machine Learning class (<ml-class.org>)
taught by Andrew Ng. Tens of thousands of students participated in the
course.
If you find Octave useful, please let us know. We are always
interested to find out how Octave is being used.
Virtually everyone thinks that the name Octave has something to do
with music, but it is actually the name of one of John W. Eaton’s former
professors who wrote a famous textbook on chemical reaction engineering,
and who was also well known for his ability to do quick ‘back of the
envelope’ calculations. We hope that this software will make it
possible for many people to do more ambitious computations just as
easily.
Everyone is encouraged to share this software with others under the
terms of the GNU General Public License (
Copying). You are also
encouraged to help make Octave more useful by writing and contributing
additional functions for it, and by reporting any problems you may have.
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