Oorange: A virtual laboratory for experimental mathematics

Oorange is a virtual laboratory for experimental mathematics. It consists of a set of infrastructure services supporting the creation, execution, and dissemination of mathematical experiments. For each component of a traditional physical experiment. there is a corresponding Oorange infrastructure feature: Object of study: High level software classes Laboratory equipment: Foundation software classes and function libraries Configuration of specific experiment: Computational network composed of objects Monitor and control: Object inspection; 2D and 3D viewers Running the experiment: Animation objects Recording the experiment: Archiving and scripting Disseminating result: Documentation A hybrid language scheme underlies the design: interpreted scripts in Tcl manage tasks requiring high flexibility, while a compiled object library in Objective C supports the underlying mathematical algorithms. The resulting system is intended to be accessible to wide range of expertise levels. Oorange is free software distributed according to a GNU-like license agreement.