I don't think you should use Perl for solving math. Rather use Perl as a glue to interact with some outside specialized math program.

R is a good program for statistics; Octave for matrix algebra. They are GNU software.

Omegahat (also free) offers R-Perl bidirectional interface.

Or, to interact with R, you can just do this in Perl:

my $Rpath = "\\user\\R\\rw\\bin\\" ;
my $Rcmd = $Rpath . "rterm --vanilla --quiet --slave" ;
my $Rscript = "whatever R commands";
$Rscript =~ s/(\r|;\r)/ ;/gm ; 
$Rscript =~ s/<-/=/gm; # \r or <- will break "echo"
print `echo $Rscript | $Rcmd`; # execute R commands & print results
[download]

_____________________
Update: an informative benchmark of various math packages at SciViews.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.