Oorange: A Virtual Laboratory for Experimental Mathematics

C. Gunn, A. Ortmann, U. Pinkall, K. Polthier, U. Schwarz
Sonderforschungsbereich Differntialgeometrie und Quantenphysik
Technische Universität Berlin - 1996

Abstract:

Oorange is a virtual laboratory for experimental mathematics. It consists of a set of infrastructure services supporting the creation, execution, and dissemination of mathematical experiments. For each component of a traditional physical experiment, there is a corresponding Oorange infrastructure feature:

Object of study: High level software classes

Laboratory equipment: Foundation software classes and function libraries

Configuration of specific experiment: Computational network composed of objects

Monitor and control: Object inspection; 2D and 3D viewers

Running the experiment: Animation objects

Recording the experiment: Archiving and scripting

Disseminating result: Documentation

A hybrid language scheme underlies the design: interpreted scripts in Tcl manage tasks requiring high flexibility, while a compiled object library in Objective C supports the underlying mathematical algorithms. The resulting system is intended to be accessible to wide range of expertise levels. Oorange is free software distributed according to a GNU-like license agreement.

Content:

• Introduction
• Overview of Oorange
• Components of the Virtual Laboratory
  • Software ingredients
    • Objective C
    • Tcl
  • Computational network manager
    • The Script Editor
  • Object inspection
    • Navigation in the inspection manager
    • Viewers
  • Time
    • The hierarchy of time managers
    • Tcl scripts and time
  • Archiving
  • Documentation
• Special Tools
  • Workhorse classes: OoDataGrid and OoFunction
  • Connectivity to other programs
• Previous work
• Future directions
• Conclusion
• References

Copyright © 1997 Sonderforschungsbereich 288, Differential Geometry and Quantum Physics, TU-Berlin