GNU Octave Control Toolbox

GNU Octave is a powerful, free software programming language designed for numerical computations. It provides a high-level syntax largely compatible with Matlab, making it an accessible tool for engineers and scientists. Octave includes built-in capabilities for 2D and 3D plotting and visualization, allowing users to easily generate graphs and charts from their data. It runs on multiple operating systems, including GNU/Linux, macOS, BSD, and Microsoft Windows.

Key features include:

• Mathematics-oriented syntax: Efficiently perform complex calculations using vectors and matrices.
• Extensibility: A rich ecosystem of packages can be installed to add specialized functionality.
• Cross-platform compatibility: Available for major operating systems.

Octave excels at solving systems of equations through its robust linear algebra operations. For instance, solving Ax = b is straightforward:

b = [4; 9; 2] # Column vector
A = [ 3 4 5;
      1 3 1;
      3 5 9 ]
x = A \ b     # Solve the system Ax = b

Visualizing data is equally simple with high-level plot commands:

x = -10:0.1:10; # Create an evenly-spaced vector from -10..10
y = sin (x);    # y is also a vector
plot (x, y);
title ("Simple 2-D Plot");
xlabel ("x");
ylabel ("sin (x)");

The latest development version can be obtained via Mercurial, and recent releases, such as version 10.3.0, are readily available for download. Octave is licensed under the GNU General Public License.