Mac Science Collaboration group

[Michael Crawford]

I did my UCSC undergraduate Physics thesis on a Monte Carlo
calculation built on CERNLIB.  It's a numerical physics library
distributed by - you guess it! - CERN.  And I got to spend the Summer
of '93 at the big accellerator lab in Geneva.  We were searching for
non-conservation of lepton number; had we actually found it, my
advisor Clem Heusch would almost certainly have gotten the Nobel
Prize.

We never did find it though.

CERNLIB can numerically calculate just about Anything Known To Man
about Physics.

It's written in FORTRAN.

I'm not real sure that it's in wide use anymore, as back then - in
1993 - the High Energy Physics community was just beginning to move to
C++.  The reason I was given was that newly entering grad students
didn't know FORTRAN anymore, as it was no longer taught to
undergraduates.  I was among the last to get FORTRAN in school, I
think.

But given all that, would anyone be interested in a CERNLIB built for Mac OS X?

Unfortunately, much of CERNLIB and its associated tools have to be
about the cruftiest, arcane, absolutely half-baked bunch of obfuscated
code I have ever had the misfortune to come across.  This because many
of its coders, being physics grad students, had no actual experience
in software engineering.

The other students were all astounded at the Beauty and the Grace of
my own FORTRAN code.  I'd been out of school for several years,
working as a coder in Silicon Valley.

I've been toying lately, with the idea of going back to school to
finally get my Physics PhD.  But not to study particle physics this
time.  Instead it would be to help develop new, non-polluting and
renewable forms of energy.

I understand that's all the rage these days.

In any case, building CERNLIB on OS X would be a good way to brush up
on so much that I've forgotten.

Mike
-- 
Michael David Crawford
mdcrawford at gmail dot com

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