There was a numerical analyst at JPL back in the day that absolutely savaged NR. Remember, the kind of engineering they do at JPL has to be correct, not just p

There was a numerical analyst at JPL back in the day that absolutely savaged NR. Remember, the kind of engineering they do at JPL has to be correct, not just plausible. Also, noncommercial alternatives to things like Matlab (octave, the python interfaces to Netlib libraries, etc) weren't as mainstream then, and science and engineering research had a bigger "get a book and roll your own" ethic. https://web.archive.org/web/19990202153232/http://math.jpl.nasa.gov/nr/nr.html https://web.archive.org/web/19990202153232/http://math.jpl.n... I've seen it breed horrors - "senior" people instructing interns to implement its matrix inversion routine line-by-line in Matlab. Today it would be Python. Oh, and here's a list of alternatives, from the heyday of NR: https://web.archive.org/web/19990202141044/http://math.jpl.nasa.gov/nr/nr-alt.html https://web.archive.org/web/19990202141044/http://math.jpl.n...