What software is commonly used for solving problems in relativity?

[jason12345]

When checking results, solving a problem, simulating a problem etc in relativity, what software do you tend to use?

cheers,

Jason

 

[George Jones]

GRTensorII.

 

[bcrowell]

Maxima with the ctensor package is free and open source, and it does all the things I've wanted to do. Lots of examples here: http://www.lightandmatter.com/genrel/

Cadabra is a package designed for coordinate-independent calculations.

 

[Mentz114]

Mathematica with the ctensor package is free and open source, and it does all the things I've wanted to do. Lots of examples here: http://www.lightandmatter.com/genrel/

Cadabra is a package designed for coordinate-independent calculations.

Do you mean Maxima ( and its interfaces wxMaxima and xMaxima ) ?

 

[bcrowell]

Do you mean Maxima ( and its interfaces wxMaxima and xMaxima ) ?

Ugh -- yeah, I meant maxima, not mathematica. Thanks for the correction! I've edited my post to correct it.

 

[Mentz114]

Thanks for the correction!

My pleasure.

If the OP is interested I have a number of useful scripts for GR calculations, covariant differentiation and other stuff.

 

[jason12345]

Thanks for the replies so far which will have been useful to people reading this thread. When transforming the user defined world lines of a set of particles in one frame to another, would you be advised to use Mathematica, Maple, C++, Java, etc?

To any students or university researchers in particular, what are your main programming languages?

 

[bcrowell]

Thanks for the replies so far which will have been useful to people reading this thread. When transforming the user defined world lines of a set of particles in one frame to another, would you be advised to use Mathematica, Maple, C++, Java, etc?

To any students or university researchers in particular, what are your main programming languages?

Are these world-lines defined numerically or algebraically? Do you want the result of the transformation expressed numerically, or algebraically? Maxima and GRTensorII are computer algebra systems.

 

[jason12345]

Are these world-lines defined numerically or algebraically? Do you want the result of the transformation expressed numerically, or algebraically? Maxima and GRTensorII are computer algebra systems.

Numerically would be fine. Even better would be defining the paths the particles take in space either algebraically or numerically as a function of time in one frame, and then seeing how they move in different frames graphically.

 

[bcrowell]

Numerically would be fine. Even better would be defining the paths the particles take in space either algebraically or numerically as a function of time in one frame, and then seeing how they move in different frames graphically.

Numerically and algebraically are two totally different ball-games. A lot of people use MATLAB for numerical stuff. The open-source equivalent is Octave.