What is Taylor?

Taylor is an ODE solver generator, written by Maorong Zou and Àngel Jorba. It reads a system of ODEs and it outputs an ANSI C routine that performs a single step of the numerical integration of these ODEs, by means of the Taylor method.

Each step of integration chooses the step and the order in an adaptive way trying to keep the local error below a given threshold, and to minimize the global computational effort. Taylor also includes support for several extended precision arithmetics.

Taylor has been developed and tested under the GNU/Linux operating system. We do not expect major problems to run it under any version of Unix, but we do not plan to write ports for other operating systems.

Taylor is released under the GNU Public License (GPL), so anybody with Internet access is free to get it and to redistribute it.
 


Getting Taylor

Taylor is distributed in a gzipped tar file. To retrieve it, click here.

The last version is Taylor-1.4.4, released on April 2008. To see the differences with previous versions, click here.
 


Installing Taylor

After downloading the distribution taylor-x.y.z.tgz, where x.y.z is the version number, unpack the archive using the command

tar xvzf taylor-x.y.z.tgz

or, if your version of tar does not handle compressed files, you can also use

gzip -dc taylor-x.y.z.tgz | tar xvf -

This will create a directory Taylor-x.y. Change to this directory.

Now, to compile taylor, run make. It will produce the executable taylor in the current directory. You need an ANSI C compiler and a lex/yacc parser generator to compile taylor. Using gcc and flex/bison is highly recommended.

To install taylor, simply copy the executable taylor (and, if you want, the manual page src/taylor.1) to its destination directory. You can put the binary in one of your directories or, if you have the right permissions, in a system directory,

cp taylor /usr/local/bin/taylor

In this case, you may also want to install the man page,

cp src/taylor.1 /usr/local/man/man1/taylor.1
 


Using Taylor

There are several documents related to the use of taylor:
  You may also want to try Taylor online.