28 April 2007

SO(3,1) (Lorentz Group) Manipulations from PLT Scheme

I just released a PlaneT package which manipulates elements of the Lorentz group (here). Get it using

(require (planet "SO31.ss" ("wmfarr" "SO31.plt" 1 0)))
At the moment, it only runs on Mac OS 10.3 or 10.4, ppc, because it uses some C code I wrote (for efficiency), and I haven't had the patience to understand all the hoops I need to jump through to get PLT Scheme to compile this to a library on every system.

If someone on Windows or Linux (or an x86 mac) really wants to use the package, it's pretty easy to compile manually (after downloading and installing from PlaneT): just compile the SO31.c file in the SO31c subdirectory of the package to a dynamic library in the same directory named "libSO31.", linking with BLAS and LAPACK.

I hope people find all this linear algebra stuff useful (it certainly will be for my thesis code).

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm surprised that you decided to use the C FFI to manipulate 4x4 matrices; they are so small that it would seem better just to use mzscheme's numerical facilities (ewh

Unknown said...

(to finish my comment ...) which are getting better all the time.