Scientific Computing and Plotting | Schema Programming Part 31

Racket comes with a batteries-included math library and a powerful visualization library plot.

The Math Library

#lang racket
(require math)

; Big Floats (Arbitrary precision)
(bf-precision 128)
(bf "3.141592653589793238462643383279502884")

; Statistics
(mean '(1 2 3 4 5))
(stddev '(1 2 3 4 5))

; Linear Algebra
(matrix [[1 2] [3 4]])

Plotting Data

The plot library is incredibly versatile.

(require plot)

(plot (function sin -5 5))

This opens a window with an interactive sine wave graph!

3D Plotting

(plot3d (surface3d (lambda (x y) (* (sin x) (cos y)))
                   -3 3 -3 3))

Integrating with the Web

You can render plots directly to SVG or PNG to embed in web pages (like this blog!).

(plot-file (function sin -5 5)
           "sine-wave.svg"
           #:kind 'svg)

Summary

Whether you are doing homework statistics or complex simulations, Racket's math and plot collections rival Python's NumPy and Matplotlib for ease of use and visual quality.