> IIRC the Numerical Recipes book was a bit of a copyright Trojan Horse. (I don't know if that's really true, I just heard it mentioned somewhere.) Oh yes, thi

> IIRC the Numerical Recipes book was a bit of a copyright Trojan Horse. (I don't know if that's really true, I just heard it mentioned somewhere.) Oh yes, this brings back memories. The first edition, I believe, had a fairly permissive license. The second edition had a more restrictive license (it probably wasn't that bad - the authors wanted a payment for use, and I don't think it was a lot). I was an undergrad doing a summer internship with a professor, and he wanted me to implement the method of steepest descent (or something similar) in Fortran for his computation. He told me to just copy it from the NR book. I dutifully looked at the license and told him we needed to pay to use it. He looked at it and said "Wow, they've gone hard core." Then he handed the book back to me and said "Well, we need an implementation in Fortran. Find a way, and don't come back to me until it's done." I'm pretty sure that was code for "Do it and don't tell anyone." I instead spent days finding code online that was not restricted. Finally got one that worked. Later on I spoke to numerical computation researchers and they had a universal disdain for that book. Apparently a lot of the algorithms were outdated - even when the book was published. Better algorithms existed, and they were numerically stable.