Software for mathematical analysis [ video data compression ]

An important type of software package that belongs in the engineering workplace is a mathematical analysis package. Popular packages include MATLAB, Mathematics, Mathcad and Maple V. The various packages are compared and contrasted here with regard to the insight that they can provide for a topic of current interest. The selected topic is cosine-transform data-compression as specified in the MPEG standard for video data compression. This problem is first introduced and the outputs of the various packages are shown with an emphasis on the insight to the problem that can be gained by using an approach that is natural to the software package under consideration