Perl for the Working (or Aspiring) Mathematician

The 21st century offers more high-level languages than you could shake a stick
at.  And for mathematical use, we already have Mathematica, Matlab, Pari/GP,
etc.  What can one more language do for you?  I will discuss the following:

* Why people use Perl; why some people love it and why others hate it.

* The minimum you need to know to write and run simple Perl programs, even if
  you haven't used such languages before.

* Text manipulation and regular expressions.  Sounds boring?  What I mean here
  is how to write a script that automatically converts your raw data into LaTeX
  tables, in the format you want, so you don't have to do it by hand.

* Numerical processing, e.g. estimation of derivatives and integrals and ODE
  solvers.  I will give some simple examples (a dozen lines of code or so).

John Kerl
Software Interest Group
October 11, 2006