v2.8.0 (8 Sep 2015)

New Team Members

• Dustin Tran, helps make variational inference a reality

New Features

• Inverse CDF for normal distribution (#1157)
• Compiler error messages are friendlier
  • operator
  • assignment (#1543, stan-dev/math#146)
• Sparse matrix by dense vector multiplication (#1565)

Bug Fixes

• Disallow user-defiend function overloading (#1547)
• Better behaved beta cdf (#1561, stan-dev/math#124)

Manual

• Corrected all known bug reports and typos; details in
  issues #1526, #1548, #1577
• Thanks to @jonathan-g (Github handle), Damjan Vukcevic,
  Daniel Chen, Guido Biele, Takahiro Kubo, Andy Choi