For four decades, VNI developed and marketed numerical problem solving software for industry, government, engineering, and education.

Visual Numerics, Inc. was founded in 1970, as International Mathematical and Statistical Libraries.  In 1992, IMSL acquired Precision Visuals, a vendor of graphics technologies. The combined company was the first to merge visualization with a computational library, providing their customers the ability to perform visual data analysis. To emphasize this position, the company was renamed Visual Numerics, Inc. Its products were the PV-WAVE family and the IMSL Numerical Libraries.

Visual Numerics was acquired by Rogue Wave in 2009.

Since before this acquisition, the Visual Numerics team has been the leader in embeddable mathematical and statistical algorithms and visualization software for data-intensive applications. These products are written by a highly specialized team of mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists that focus on the quality and reliability of the numerical algorithms, as well as the performance, portability and scalability of the libraries.  

True technology innovators, this team was the first to offer cross-platform math libraries, allowing developers to extend their applications with data manipulation techniques normally reserved to very high-end third-party statistical analysis packages.

They were also the first to:

• bind mathematics together with statistics in one comprehensive library

• combine graphical rendering tools with a computational library

• provide a commercial mathematical and statistical library written in pure Java

• introduce neural networks into a computational Java library

• provide a commercial numerical library in pure C# library for .NET applications