GNU Scientific Library

Updated on Jan 19, 2024

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Developer(s) GNU Project		Written in C
Original author(s) Mark Galassi, James Theiler, Brian Gough, Gerard Jungman and many others Initial release May 1996; 20 years ago (1996-05) Stable release GSL-2.2 / 29 August 2016; 6 months ago (2016-08-29) Repository git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gsl.git

The GNU Scientific Library (or GSL) is a software library for numerical computations in applied mathematics and science. The GSL is written in C; wrappers are available for other programming languages. The GSL is part of the GNU Project and is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

Project History

The GSL project was initiated in 1996 by physicists Mark Galassi and James Theiler of Los Alamos National Laboratory. They aimed at writing a modern replacement for widely used but somewhat outdated Fortran libraries such as Netlib. They carried out the overall design and wrote early modules; with that ready they recruited other scientists to contribute.

The "overall development of the library and the design and implementation of the major modules" was carried out by Brian Gough and Gerard Jungman. Other major contributors were Jim Davies, Reid Priedhorsky, M. Booth, and F. Rossi.

Version 1.0 was released in 2001. The library continues to be actively developed and version 2.2 was released on August 29, 2016.

Example

The following example program calculates the value of the Bessel function for 5:

The example program has to be linked to the GSL library upon compilation:

The output is shown below, and should be correct to double-precision accuracy:

J0(5) = -1.775967713143382920e-01

Features

The software library provides facilities for:

Basic mathematical functions

Complex numbers

Polynomials

Special functions

Vectors and matrices

Permutations

Combinations

Multisets

Sorting

BLAS

Linear algebra

Eigensystems

Fast Fourier transforms

Numerical integration (based on QUADPACK)

Random number generation

Quasi-random sequences

Random number distributions

Statistics

Histograms

N-tuples

Monte Carlo integration

Simulated annealing

Ordinary differential equations

Interpolation

Numerical differentiation

Chebyshev approximations

Series acceleration

Discrete Hankel transform

Root-finding in one and multiple dimensions

Minimization in one and multiple dimensions

Least-squares fitting

Nonlinear least-squares fitting

Physical constants

IEEE floating-point arithmetic

Discrete wavelet transform

Programming language bindings

Since the GSL is written in C, it is straightforward to provide wrappers for other programming languages. Such wrappers currently exist for

AMPL

C++

Fortran

Haskell

Java

Lisp

Ocaml

Octave

Perl Data Language

Python

Ruby

C++ support

The GSL can be used in C++ classes, but not using pointers to member functions, because the type of pointer to member function is different from pointer to function. Instead, pointers to static functions have to be used. Another common work around is using a functor. C++ wrappers for GSL are available, although many are not regularly maintained.

References

GNU Scientific Library Wikipedia

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