 root is an object-oriented program and library developed by cern. it was originally designed for particle physics data analysis and contains several features specific to this field, but it is also used in other applications such as astronomy and data mining. == description == cern maintained a program library written in fortran for many years; development and maintenance were discontinued in 2003 in favour of root, written in c++. root development was initiated by renÃ© brun and fons rademakers in 1994. some parts are published under the lgpl, and others are based on gpl software and thus are also published under the terms of the gpl. it provides platform independent access to a computer's graphics subsystem and operating system using abstract layers. parts of the abstract platform are: a graphical user interface and a gui builder, container classes, reflection, a c++ script and command line interpreter (cint), object serialization and persistence. thumb the packages provided by root include those for * histogramming and graphing to view and analyze distributions and functions, * curve fitting (regression analysis) and minimization of functionals, * statistics tools used for data analysis, * matrix algebra, * four-vector computations, as used in high energy physics, * standard mathematical functions, * multivariate data analysis, e.g. using neural networks, * image manipulation, used, for instance, to analyze astronomical pictures, * access to distributed data (in the context of the grid), * distributed computing, to parallelize data analyses, * [[persist
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