Introduction

Hi! I'm Joel Dahne and I will be using this blog to share the progress of my work for Google Summer of Code 2017 under GNU Octave where I will be working on improving the interval package.

About me

Currently I'm a master student in mathematics at Uppsala University, Sweden, I'm just about to complete my first year and have one more to go. I first encountered interval numerics with my bachelor thesis, during which I tried to generalize the method described in this paper to higher dimensions. The code from the project is available on GitHub, https://github.com/Urathai/generateZeros. Working on that project ignited my interest for interval numerics and I want to work to increase its availability to the common user.

The project

In short my project is about adding support for N-dimensional arrays in the interval package. At the moment the package only has support for up to 2-dimensional arrays. Most of the time this is enough but sometimes it is limiting. The goal is to have the syntax identical to the one for normal arrays. Switching from floats to intervals should be as easy as adding $infsup$ in front of the variable.

During my time preparing I have also noticed that some of the folding functions (e.g. $sum$, $prod$ and $dot$) handle some edge cases differently than the standard implementation. Hopefully this can be resolved at the same time.

This blog

During my project I will try to update this blog with my current progress. It's my first time writing a blog so we will see how it goes. The next step for me is to create more detailed plan of how I should structure my work during the summer, this will most likely be the subject of my next post.