I\'m a scientist who is quite comfortable with C for numerical computation, but I need some help with displaying the results. I want to be able to display a continuously up
GUI stuff is a regularly-reinvented wheel, and there's no reason to not use a framework.
I'd recommend using either QT4 or wxWidgets. If you're using Ubuntu, GTK+ will suffice as it talks to GNOME and may be more comfortable to you (QT and wxWidgets both require C++).
Have a look at GTK+, QT, and wxWidgets.
Here's the tutorials for all 3: