Yup, mostly because they are the same libraries that R uses. I really feel like I may need to learn Fortran at some point, given its ridiculously good numerical capabilities.

Even matlab uses those libraries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPACK )

I actually think that LAPACK will outlive us all, as I can't see anyone ever rewriting (and re-testing) the software that essentially runs science (and a large proportion of "Big Data" approaches).

And, also Octave