Notes

I used numeric.js for the first time early on in my first job in scientific computing; at the time, I even used it to code a simple web app performing 1-dimensional quantum mechanics Density Functional Theory calculations.

Needless to say, I was deeply impressed by how incredibly performant and efficient the library was, given the context it was running in. There's a certain rare art to writing code that squeezes every drop of performance from even very limited platforms, and I always felt like this library embodies it perfectly. Nowadays the ease of use of GPUs even on the web have reduced its usefulness, but I still think there may be room for it as an extremely simple and immediate tool for any applications that require numerical computations in the browser.

Unfortunately, the library has long been abandoned. I do not know what has happened - real life has gotten in the way, I suppose. But the last commits date back to 12 years ago. Since then, a lot has changed, and the code of the repository has been slowly succumbing to rot. The website at numericjs.com, likewise, has not been renewed any more, and since it relies on PHP to work, it's impossible to rehost it without paying for a server.

The javascript code itself, however, still works fine, and is in fact still hosted on NPM. Therefore I've long wanted to try and bring back at least the documentation, for convenience of any users if nothing else, using the GitHub Pages feature. This is the result of that effort.

If I have the chance, I hope to do something better. I think it would be nice to have a complete overhaul of the library, using new technologies to provide well-maintainable and automated testing, documentation generation, and so on - as long as it doesn't interfere with its performance. But for now, this was the simplest and quickest intervention I could make.

Hopefully, this will be of use to anyone looking - for whatever reason - to diagonalize matrices and solve linear systems in a single JavaScript thread! Admittedly a niche market, but having been part of it in the past, I can say with confidence it must exist.

Simone Sturniolo - 03/08/2024

Back to the main page