Numerical Mathematics Consortium Updates Open Standard

The Numerical Mathematics Consortium is a nonprofit organization comprising vendors and individuals in industry and academia committed to establishing an open mathematical semantics standard for numerical algorithm development and reuse. Established in 2005 by founding members that include INRIA (Scilab Developer), Maplesoft (Maple developer), National Instruments (LabVIEW developer) and PTC (MathCAD developer). The consortium is focused on reducing the overall cost of numerical algorithm development and increasing reuse in both industry and academia for application areas such as embedded design, industrial control and scientific research.

The Numerical Mathematics Consortium today announced the latest update of its technical specification that defines an open mathematics semantics standard for development of numerical algorithms. The revision features newly ratified functions from classes that include discrete transforms, special functions, Boolean operations, comparison operations and trigonometry.

In addition, the consortium released new technical documents and a revised function list to clarify how to specify and document function definitions. The newly resolved technical issues address practical topics related to algorithm design and compliance with the standard. For instance, the draft standard defines a consistent set of data types that lay out a uniform meaning for the input and output parameters of the defined functions. Defining these data types ensures consistent implementation and establishes guidelines that will improve the rate of progress for the definition of new functions.

The third draft revision is available for public review on the Numerical Mathematics Consortium Web site, http://www.nmconsortium.org/.