I was looking around for some open-source math software today, and stumbled across two packages that I want to share with those of you (both of you??) who might be interested.

The first is a software tool called CVXMOD.  It is a Python-based tool for setting up and solving convex optimization problems, and was developed by yet another student in Professor Stephen Boyd's research group at Stanford.  The software is based on another tool called CVX, which did the same thing and has been adopted widely throughout academia and industry.  The difference is that while CVX was tied to Matlab, CVXMOD is open-source. 

The second package is a tool called Sage.  Its mission is to create "an open-source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab", and it appears to be a really impressive job by tying together many open-source mathematical tools into a coherent interface.  The result is a package that can handle problems from elementary to advanced mathematics, whether applied or pure.  It was created by a math professor at Harvard who is my age, which is disturbing and depressing (at least to me…haha), and it's the kind of mathematical software that I longed to see ever since I started using Linux.

I have no idea right now if there is any applicability to what I want to do vis-á-vis soccer analytics, but I think mathematical software is really cool, so I wanted to share another one of my geeky passions.  I'm sure I'll figure out some application later on.