Is Clojure better than Erlang?
Depends on your definition of better. It runs on the JVM, so you have easy access to the whole ecosystem of libraries. For me, that's always a big plus compared to non-JVM languages, but if you don't use that the case gets less clear.
Started doing some erlang work, I'm very impressed in the overall design of the thing. I'd say erlang is very well suited for heavy,low-latency networking because of the design of the VM and the characteristics of the language, whereas clojure is a bit up the stack. Anyway if you prefere parenthesis you got Lisp flavoured erlang: http://lfe.io
The problem with Erlang is that it's veeeery slow, so you'll need to write the computation-heavy stuff in C.
I am new to Erlang. I assume that you mean writing a linked-in driver or NIFs. Unless you need very low and precisely controlled latency for your computation-heavy code, too, why not write it, e.g., in Python with NumPy and talk to the Python process over a port?
You could. Or you could just run on the JVM. Either way, there are some tradeoffs to make.