I'm looking for some FOSS/GPL programs (or Python libraries) for dealing with sparse matrices. I haven't found much online about these. Can someone please point me in the right direction?
2026-03-29 20:37:28.1774816648
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Good computer programs for dealing with sparse matrices
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I haven't really seen any serious numerical computing being done in Python; FORTRAN is still standard, and Netlib has a number of (free!) libraries for solving sparse linear systems, sparse eigenproblems, ... etc. You are of course welcome to construct an interface from Python to these, or probably even better, translate these into Python. Good luck!
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For general purpose, easy-to-use libraries, consider using tempelated libraries, such as MTL4, eigen, gmm++, ...etc. This article presents a bunch of them.
ARPACK is the most common and effective solution to problems involving large matrices (both sparse and dense). It's a FORTRAN library (with C++ bindings) and a very stable/mature one at that. I know personally that it is used extensively in academia, so I strongly recommend you give it a go.
In terms of Python, I believe SciPy/NumPY actually includes wrappers for ARPACK, though you'll need to investigate this a bit more. The actual implementation is written in C, so efficiency is not at all a problem.