> What justification is there for preferring R to Matlab, other than cost?
My impression is that the primary problem domains for these two are pretty different.
Matlab is pretty heavily targeted at folks doing numerical analysis [1], e.g. solving differential equations related to physics/engineering/economics, and has its origins as a wrapper around existing fortran implementations for numerical linear algebra. Engineers, especially, use Matlab all over the place.
The R project explicitly is interested with statistics [2], and as someone earlier pointed out, make is pretty easy to do analysis on a dataset. Though, I have pretty limited experience with R, so I could be mistaken.
[1] Cleve Moler. Numerical Computing with MATLAB. http://www.mathworks.com/moler/chapters.html
This is the guy who wrote the first Matlab implementations, and founded Mathworks.
About: I graduated in May with an M.S. in math; my thesis focused on developing and solving a mathematical problem in glaciology and writing numerical code to approximate solutions. In July,
I wrapped up a research fellowship where I wrote code to automate tsunami models. Now I'm out looking for work. I'm looking for a junior dev position; I've been doing a lot of work in nodejs recently, and I'd love to keep that up, but I'm more than happy to learn other platforms.
Alternatively, if you need (or just want) a mathematician to think about your problems, I might be your guy.
Applied mathematician with a deep affection for coding and geophysics. This past May I wrapped up my M.S. in math; my thesis focused on developing and solving a mathematical problem in glaciology (thesis: http://www.lygi.me/thesis.pdf); my coursework and research focused on numerical analysis and PDE's. I'm looking for interesting problems where I can leverage my math background; bonus points if the phrases "free-boundary problem" or "variational inequality" come up.
I use Harvest for time tracking and invoicing. The free tier is fine if you only have two clients at a time, and the cheapest paid plan is pretty affordable.
Applied mathematician with a deep affection for coding and geophysics. This past
May I wrapped up my M.S. in math; my thesis focused on developing and solving a
mathematical problem in glaciology (thesis: http://www.lygi.me/thesis.pdf);
my coursework and research focused on numerical analysis and PDE's.
Looking for interesting problems where I can leverage my math background, bonus points
if the phrase "free-boundary problem" comes up.
My impression is that the primary problem domains for these two are pretty different.
Matlab is pretty heavily targeted at folks doing numerical analysis [1], e.g. solving differential equations related to physics/engineering/economics, and has its origins as a wrapper around existing fortran implementations for numerical linear algebra. Engineers, especially, use Matlab all over the place.
The R project explicitly is interested with statistics [2], and as someone earlier pointed out, make is pretty easy to do analysis on a dataset. Though, I have pretty limited experience with R, so I could be mistaken.
[1] Cleve Moler. Numerical Computing with MATLAB. http://www.mathworks.com/moler/chapters.html This is the guy who wrote the first Matlab implementations, and founded Mathworks.
[2] The R Project for Statistical Computing. http://www.r-project.org/