August 7, 2001
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

VISUAL NUMERICS ANNOUNCES PV-WAVE VERSION 7.5

BOULDER, Colo. -- Visual Numerics, Inc., a developer of web-enabled data visualization, numerical analysis and enterprise software solutions, today announced that PV-WAVE Version 7.5 is now available.

PV-WAVE is a family of easy-to-use software products that let engineers, scientists, researchers and business analysts understand large and complex datasets using a wide variety of visual techniques. PV-WAVE's interactive, array-based scripting language allows users to rapidly develop platform-neutral applications for manipulating, analyzing and visualizing these datasets to detect and display trends, patterns and anomalies. The software includes hundreds of sophisticated mathematical and statistical functions from the company's IMSL C Numerical Library (CNL), as well as image processing, signal processing and general mapping functionality.

The two major enhancements in Version 7.5 are OpenGL support via VTK (The Visualization ToolKit), an Open Source, freely available software system developed by Clifton Park, New York-based Kitware, Inc., that provides 3D graphics, image processing, and advanced visualization; and the addition of 77 new CNL functions, including 50 that were specifically designed for the finance and insurance industries.

"The enhancements to PV-WAVE 7.5 demonstrate our commitment to providing our user base with software tools that increase productivity while solving more complex problems," said Margaret Journey, Visual Numerics' director of visualization technology. PV-WAVE 7.5 delivers high-level 3D interactive visualization techniques using OpenGL. Included are more than two dozen new functions that allow access to Kitware's VTK, both at a high-level for ease-of-use, and through low-level routines that facilitate the creation of more complex, specialized visualizations. With this release, PV-WAVE will provide the high-level 3D interactive visualization techniques commonly associated with OpenGL without burdening its users with having to learn hundreds of low-level commands. The integration of VTK into PV-WAVE provided the optimum solution. PV-WAVE users are now able to produce accelerated graphics in their applications without learning a new programming paradigm or understanding the intricacies of OpenGL. The new plotting functions are very similar to the existing PV-WAVE 2D and 3D plotting functions. This new functionality gives users all of the benefits of the Visualization Toolkit, including:

• A wide variety of visualization algorithms including scalar, vector, tensor, texture, and volumetric methods;
• Advanced modeling techniques such as isosurfaces, streamlines, implicit modeling, cutting planes, swept surfaces, hedgehogs, glyphs, texture mapping, clipping transparency, and Delaunay triangulation;
• Many imaging algorithms allowing mixing of 2D imaging, 3D graphics algorithms and data.

PV-WAVE 7.5 includes 50 new financial analysis functions from Visual Numerics' IMSL C Numerical Library. This new functionality is designed to help brokerage firms or insurance companies, for example, perform financial modeling to analyze various risk factors associated with their business. Included are routines for calculating depreciation of assets, internal rates of return, bond amortization, and net present values.

In addition, PV-WAVE 7.5 features new statistical analysis functionality, including enhanced random number generators and a Kalman filter. Kalman filters are useful in a variety of applications including navigation, surveying, vehicle tracking, geology, oceanography, fluid dynamics, and demographic estimation.

Availability & Pricing
PV-WAVE 7.5 is available for many popular operating systems: Windows 98, Windows 2000/NT, Unix (Sun, HP, SGI, Compaq & IBM), and Linux.

Windows and Linux pricing starts at $1,795*.
Unix and OpenVMS pricing starts at $3,995*.

About Visual Numerics
Privately held Visual Numerics has provided technical software solutions for more than 30 years. The company's software products help users understand complex data from a wide variety of data sources. Visual Numerics provides its data visualization and numerical analysis software tools to major corporations, academic institutions, and research laboratories worldwide. Typical users include scientists, researchers, engineers, and financial analysts at organizations such as Bear, Stearns & Company; Sandia National Laboratories; American Association of Railroads; Boeing Company; and Coleman Research Corp.

This large and diverse customer base is supported through a direct sales force, wholly-owned international subsidiaries, and international distributors.

Visual Numerics' product line includes the IMSL Libraries for mathematical and statistical analysis; the PV-WAVE Development Environment for desktop visual data analysis applications; the PV-WAVE Web Development Environment for network-based visual data analysis applications; and PV-WAVE Applications and Toolkits for time-series data analysis, image processing, and signal processing.