From the GNU Octave Wikipedia page:

GNU Octave is a high-level programming language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a command-line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with MATLAB. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language. As part of the GNU Project, it is free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Octave is one of the two major open-source alternatives to MATLAB, the other one being Scilab. Scilab however puts less emphasis on (bidirectional) syntactic compatibility with MATLAB than Octave does.

QtOctave is an open source GUI front-end application for GNU Octave.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• QtOctave Development Team (2011), QtOctave (Version  0.10.1).  Available from https://www.openhub.net/p/qtoctave.

1. computation
2. mathematics
3. matlab
4. octave
5. Resources @ QUBES - Software
6. simulation