John Woods merged my last pull request to NMatrix recently and I wanted to write about why we created these shortcuts and what can be done with them.

Last week we selected three excellent candidates for SciRuby fellowships. We were incredibly pleased to be able to offer so many fellowships, made possible in part by the generosity of an anonymous contributor.

On Friday, we released the somewhat overdue second alpha of NMatrix, version 0.0.2.

This second alpha has boasts a significantly improved and much more maintainable code base, thanks to our Summer 2012 SciRuby Fellow, Chris Wailes, and sponsoring organization Brighter Planet.

We are incredibly pleased to announce that the Ruby Association has awarded us a 1,000,000 JPY grant.

When we applied, we proposed to build upon our successful SciRuby Summer of Code, which we undertook with the support of Brighter Planet. We are pleased to announce applications for SciRuby fellowships.

Activity has picked up enormously on our listserv over the last few weeks, which makes us all very happy.

Chris Wailes and I have been working on a major refactoring of NMatrix, our replacement for NArray. You may recall that we released our first alpha (0.0.1) back in April, and that we’ve been relatively silent since then.

We were blown away by the quality of the application pool for our first ever SciRuby Summer of Code, sponsored by Brighter Planet. We received eight exemplary applications for a single placement, and nearly every applicant showed up on at least one selection committee member’s top-three list.

We are immensely pleased to announce the first ever SciRuby Summer of Code, sponsored by Brighter Planet.

The fellowship is intended for undergraduate and graduate science and engineering students interested in going into research.

Two months ago, I mentioned the existence of a prototype Ruby linear algebra library, written in C.

I am pleased to announce that yesterday we released our first alpha of said library, NMatrix v0.0.1.

Maybe you’ve been wondering why the SciRuby people have been so quiet lately.

Mostly, we’ve been working on NMatrix, which is our prototype linear algebra library, written as a Ruby C extension.

We made it to the top spot on Hacker News on Halloween (three days ago now). We weren’t quite prepared for the level of interest generated by that posting, so we’ve experienced a few growing pains. (Please please please don’t send us to Slashdot.)