Degenerate Conic

The Brouwer-Lyddane elements are a set of "mean elements" used to describe the orbit of a spacecraft.

The FMIN function at Netlib is based on Richard Brent's classic localmin algorithm from [1].

Reference [1] describes a numerical method for computing the derivative of a 1D function, using Neville's algorithm to extrapolate from a sequence of simple polynomial approximations based on interpolating points within specific bounds of a given point.

Consider the problem of finding all the roots of a polynomial.

"I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead." - Shakespeare, "King Lear", Act IV, Scene 7 Typically, we see examples of poor saps who think that legacy Fortran codes must be converted to "modern" languages such as C++.

Fortran compiler development continues, with regular updates across a range of compilers.

The dark ages of confusion about where to get and how to install a Fortran compiler for your platform are over.

From A FORTRAN Coloring Book by Roger Kaufman (1978) Finding the \(x\) where a scalar function \(f(x) = 0\) is a common problem in numerical programming.

Fortran 2023 (ISO/IEC 1539-1:2023) has been officially published.

Image created with the assistance of NightCafe Creator.

Some Earth-Moon NRHOs.

NightCafe AI generated image for "old computers" The classic Fortran routines r1mach (for single precision real numbers), d1mach (for double precision real numbers), and i1mach (for integers) were originally written in the mid-1970s for the purpose of ret…

In today's episode of "What where the Fortran dudes in the 1980s thinking?"

The glacially slow pace of Fortran language development continues!

There are a lot of classic Fortran libraries from the 1970s to the early 1990s whose names end in "pack" (or, more specifically, "PACK").