[Fwd: Future of Jama]

[Ron Boisvert <boisvert@nist.gov>]

Sender: Dimitri Pourbaix <pourbaix@astro.ulb.ac.be>
Subject: Future of Jama


Dear,

I am leader of about 60 scientists who are designing codes for the data
reduction pipeline of the future European Space Agency mission Gaia.
Jama was adopted as our minear algebra package.  So far, almost so good.

I would like to know what your current plans are regarding the further
development of Jama.  The last change of the web page dates back to
July 2005 so I wonder if we can expect any post 1.0.2 release.

For instance, I am using SVD for least square model fitting.  Your package
provides the singular value decomposition but it lacks an efficient way of
solve a system of equation by SVD.  Such a solution indeed relies up the
inverse of S.  As a diagonal matrix, its inverse is straightforward to
compute if one accesses its elements.  Using Jama methods only. one should
call the inverse method ... which cannot take any advantage of the special
structure of S.  So, maybe a method which returns the inverse of S (both as
vector and as a matrix) would be useful.  Do not you think?

I sure can write such an extension myself but I am sure a lot of Jama
users would benefit from such similar additional methods.

With my best regards,
D. Pourbaix.
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