Talk:Numerical Recipes

Mathematics Start‑class Low‑priority

	Mathematics portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Mathematics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of mathematics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.MathematicsWikipedia:WikiProject MathematicsTemplate:WikiProject Mathematicsmathematics
Start	This article has been rated as Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Low	This article has been rated as Low-priority on the project's priority scale.

Link to Colt for Java

Hi, I think that it would me useful to add a link to the voice about the Colt library for Java. I say this because in the past I actually found myself looking for something similar to Numerical Recipes for Java, and it wasn't straightforward to find it. I actually don't know of a Java version of the LEDA library, so if anyone knows one, it would be nice to add a link in the LEDA voice as well.

Thanks,

155.198.157.29 (talk) 14:28, 12 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

deleted section

I deleted the following section from the article:

Negative criticism of the books, almost without exception, has one or more of the following characteristics:

It refers to the first edition
It is nonspecific
It is anonymous
It is unsupported by citations or reference to "better" techniques
Assertions of "efficiency" are not quantitative
It cites numerous "bugs" that have long since been corrected
It claims something like "serious scholars have long since derided <some NR algorithm that is not explicitly named> and now "modern techniques" are in use, all without specific citations
It claims something like "the book seems OK at first glance but serious analysis of 'my specialist area' shows that at least this part of the book is deficient"

As such, much of the negative criticism of the book has much in common with urban myth or pseudoscience.

In my opinion, this is not a fair reflection of the complaints which have been mentioned in reviews about the books. I replaced the above fragment with a summary of the main critisms. -- Jitse Niesen 18:24, 5 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Jitse

I liked your NPOV rephrasing of my bullet points. If anything, your phrasing makes the case for NR more strongly than my rather more explicit list. I particularly liked the bit about clear and intelligible programs being efficient.

Notwithstanding that, all the complaints about the book that I have seen DO adhere to the bullet points...I'd be very interested to see any complaints you have about NR that we could discuss.

best wishes

Robinh 20:19, 5 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Robin, I'm glad that you like my changes. All reviews about NR that I've read (which are just a few) refer to the first edition (except for the reviews of the Fortran 90 book, which is quite different); however, I think it is quite natural that the second edition of a book is not reviewed as widely as the first edition. So it's not so much that the text which I deleted is not true, it's only that I did not like the tone, especially of the last sentence.

As for my personal opinion about NR: I have only browsed through it and I've heard people talking about it, so I don't feel qualified to give a definitive opinion, but my impression is not that bad. I think that people using NR should be warned that it's not the final word; a lot of theory and alternative algorithms is omitted (as is necessary for a book of this scope), and the writing style may cause some people to forget this. However, the book seems quite okay as an introduction for non-mathematicians (I think it has too little analysis for mathematicians), and if you just have an easy problem that you want to solve numerically, that's all you need.

I hope that clarifies my position a bit. All the best, Jitse Niesen 00:08, 6 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

PS: I just added a section on software in Numerical Analysis mentioning NR, which you are welcome to review. Jitse Niesen 00:51, 6 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia articles are not the place to give your opinions on neither the book nor the criticisms of it. Both its criticism and "criticism about the criticism" have to be properly sourced. 190.188.180.148 (talk) 23:52, 10 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Criticism

Can anyone point out where in Whaley it says that "LAPACK with a highly optimized BLAS library can be an order of magnitude faster than textbook linear-algebra routines such as the Gaussian elimination or LU decomposition code in Numerical Recipes"? I tried to locate this statement, or anything like it, in the paper, but couldn't. --Robert.Baruch (talk) 19:04, 14 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

In the beginning of part III of the paper, they point out that level-3 BLAS operations (which are what is used in LAPACK for things like LU decomposition) "can display orders of magnitude speedups" compared to unoptimized code (e.g. the textbook-style triply nested loops are specifically mentioned), and they back this up by comparing benchmarks (fig. 4) to the reference BLAS, which is basically the textbook 3-loop implementation. (As far as I can tell, there is nothing controversial about this statement; the order-of-magnitude speedups from rearranging algorithms for locality is the whole reason behind the restructuring of the old LINPACK+EISPACK into LAPACK+BLAS. But I haven't seen anyone who bothered to publish a benchmark specifically against Numerical Recipes; everyone who does numerical linear algebra seriously already knows that NR is an order of magnitude slower precisely because it copies the old pre-LAPACK style.) — Steven G. Johnson (talk) 22:48, 14 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Not that I disagree with the statement, but I just think the positioning of the phrase "such as the ... code in Numerical Recipes" is somewhat misleading, putting the phrase in the mouths of the authors. Perhaps a tiny rewrite? --Robert.Baruch (talk) 22:36, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that it could be more clearly worded. — Steven G. Johnson (talk) 12:30, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Remove this page entirely?

There are decisions to be taken about this page. Is it a balanced piece of information about what a book has to offer, or is it a springboard for a rant? At the moment, the "Overview" section is less informative than an Amazon search. The external links section is fundamentally useless: the NR site can be found more quickly using Google, and the other sites are of poor quality and are confusing. For example, the "Boycott numerical recipes" is merely a vehemently expressed, vitriolic attack on restricted licenses, and the Numerical Recipes authors are hardly the only people out there to have imposed licensing conditions. One feels that they were unfortunate to fall in the gun-sights! "Boycott.." also fails to display legibly in many popular browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer 7), which is not acceptable for a Wikipedial external source.

Good encyclopedias give guidance to the person who doesn't have a huge background. This wikipedia page won't tell the numerical expert anything they don't already know, and will leave the numerical beginner completely confused about whether NR is a good book or a bad, and none the wiser about what's in it.

Can I suggest that this page be removed completely since it is worse than the sum of an Amazon and a Google search? 149.155.96.6 (talk) 13:14, 4 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]