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Cleve Moler has died

mathworks.com

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Re: Cleve Moler has died

#11

Post by MatteoFrigo »

generuso wrote: post #6

Cleve Moler was one of the big names in numerical methods, and participated in creation of canonical FORTRAN libraries for solving linear equations, and matrix algorithms more generally. To teach this more conveniently to his students, he wrote the original version of MATrixLABoratory to allow interactive exploration of the library functions without having to compile FORTRAN code. The original version was about 2000…

A true giant. His algorithm for Pythagorean addition, which computes sqrt(a^2 + b^2) without taking square roots, is a wonderful gem.

Fun anecdote about early Matlab. In the '80s, while in high school, I "acquired" the source code of an early version of matlab, similar to the one that you linked. An email from Cleve Moler in 1990 asked people not to distribute the code, so I didn't give it to anybody. In the late '90s I visited Cleve Moler at his Mathworks office, and he proudly showed the early Matlab running on DOS, remarking that he only had that binary but had lost the source code. So I gave it to him.

Re: Cleve Moler has died

#12

Post by raverbashing »

scientism wrote: post #9

MATLAB was used extensively during my electronics eng degree 20+ years ago. You could do pretty much about anything with it: signal processing, neural networks t, simulations, anything... It was what made me take an interest into programming. Sad day. RIP Cleve.

Yes (and Simulink helped a lot)

I mean of course you can do them all without simulink but it was much easier

Re: Cleve Moler has died

#13

Post by jeremyjh »

generuso wrote: post #6

Cleve Moler was one of the big names in numerical methods, and participated in creation of canonical FORTRAN libraries for solving linear equations, and matrix algorithms more generally. To teach this more conveniently to his students, he wrote the original version of MATrixLABoratory to allow interactive exploration of the library functions without having to compile FORTRAN code. The original version was about 2000…

I didn’t know his name but certainly knew about MATLAB. He sounds worthy of a black bar to me.

Re: Cleve Moler has died

#14

Post by ozgung »

generuso wrote: post #6

Cleve Moler was one of the big names in numerical methods, and participated in creation of canonical FORTRAN libraries for solving linear equations, and matrix algorithms more generally. To teach this more conveniently to his students, he wrote the original version of MATrixLABoratory to allow interactive exploration of the library functions without having to compile FORTRAN code. The original version was about 2000…

I haven't realized MATLAB was that old. It's one of the earliest software for PC yet still almost without alternative for engineers in 2026.

Re: Cleve Moler has died

#15

Post by ktpsns »

Matlab inspired the scilab ecosystem, which is based on numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas. This was a major driver for the data science industry for a decade before AI kicked in and tensorflow, etc. was also built ontop of these libraries.

While I personally try to avoid contemporary matlab at any cost, the open source ecosystem is great and matlab would be my go-to tool if they would not exist.

Re: Cleve Moler has died

#16

Post by leopd »

KenoFischer wrote: post #2

I only met him twice, so I don't have much to say, but let me share Alan's message instead, since he knew him well: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/cleve-moler-rip/137235 .

I also barely knew Cleve directly, but his impact and insight was legendary. I got to work at The Mathworks early in my career, and the respect Cleve had was clearly deserved. Technically brilliant, but also with a keen foresight for where the industry was going and how to best serve it. RIP

Re: Cleve Moler has died

#18

Post by cdavid »

ktpsns wrote: post #15

Matlab inspired the scilab ecosystem, which is based on numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas. This was a major driver for the data science industry for a decade before AI kicked in and tensorflow, etc. was also built ontop of these libraries. While I personally try to avoid contemporary matlab at any cost, the open source ecosystem is great and matlab would be my go-to tool if they would not exist.

scilab is not based on numpy/etc. However, matlab was certainly an inspiration for the scientific python stack in early 2000s. I myself started contributing to numpy and matplotlib by adding missing features I needed to move away from matlab in 2006 or so.

Re: Cleve Moler has died

#19

Post by aaron695 »

generuso wrote: post #6

Cleve Moler was one of the big names in numerical methods, and participated in creation of canonical FORTRAN libraries for solving linear equations, and matrix algorithms more generally. To teach this more conveniently to his students, he wrote the original version of MATrixLABoratory to allow interactive exploration of the library functions without having to compile FORTRAN code. The original version was about 2000…

[dead]

Re: Cleve Moler has died

#20

Post by bachmeier »

generuso wrote: post #6

Cleve Moler was one of the big names in numerical methods, and participated in creation of canonical FORTRAN libraries for solving linear equations, and matrix algorithms more generally. To teach this more conveniently to his students, he wrote the original version of MATrixLABoratory to allow interactive exploration of the library functions without having to compile FORTRAN code. The original version was about 2000…

MATLAB competed in the same space with a piece of software called GAUSS. Both had their initial commercial release in 1984. MATLAB eventually went on to dominate most areas, but I had to deal with the pain of writing my dissertation in GAUSS, which continues to be heavily used in specific areas today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAUSS_(software)

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