A National Workshop on FOSS in Science was held at the Union Christian (UC) College during January 4-6, 2007, in which about one hundred students, teachers and researchers from various parts of India participated.
In continuation of that workshop, we are organising a three-day Workshop on LaTeX and Scilab at the same venue. The workshop is being organised in association with the FOSSEE project, IIT, Mumbai, and the Bhaskaracharya Pratishthana, Pune. It is being funded by the National Mission on Education through ICT (NME-ICT).
The workshop will consist of lectures and hands-on sessions in LaTeX and Scilab. LaTeX is a document preparation system that can produce good-looking documents without much difficulty, especially technical documents that contain equations. LaTeX is essential to prepare neat documents containing mathematical equations. A number of journals prefer papers to be submitted in LaTeX and several universities require theses to be made using LaTeX. Its popularity is increasing in universities in Kerala also, and it is now part of the Mathematics curriculum of Calicut University.
Scilab is a software package for numerical computations providing a powerful open computing environment for engineering and scientific applications. Designed with compatibility to Matlab in mind, most scripts written for Matlab can be run directly in Scilab. Scilab includes hundreds of mathematical functions with the possibility to add programs interactively from various languages such as C, C++ and Fortran. It has sophisticated data structures (including lists, polynomials, rational functions, linear systems, and so on), an interpreter and a high level programming language.
Lectures will be given by experts in the subjects from IITs, Bhaskaracharya Pratishthana and other institutes. Participants will have opportunity to get hands on training in the topics covered. The training will be done in GNU/Linux operating system.
