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Cleve Moler has died
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Re: Cleve Moler has died
#22I was lucky to have the office across the hall from him at MathWorks around 2000. He was always interested in chatting with whomever came by and learning about what they were working on. He was always a college professor at heart.
Re: Cleve Moler has died
#23I was lucky to have the office across the hall from him at MathWorks around 2000. He was always interested in chatting with whomever came by and learning about what they were working on. He was always a college professor at heart.
Penny Anderson was in his office one day. They were trying to figure out which LAPACK numerical algorithm to use under the covers to power some MATLAB function. The different algorithms performed better for different types of matrices and different hardware specifications. They were trying to work out some heuristic where they could automatically pick the right one for the user, but they were having trouble coming up with reliable rules. Finally, Penny proposed exposing it as an option so the user could specify the one they wanted. Cleve responded with something like "If you and I can't figure out which algorithm to use, our customers have no chance. So let's just pick the one that usually works well and not make them try guess."
Re: Cleve Moler has died
#24Cleve was chairman of the C.S. department at the University of New Mexico from 1980 to 1984. I got my MSCS there in 1985, in a large part thanks to Cleve. I never took any of his courses, but I did speak to him off and on, because he was friendly, approachable and was an advocate of me being allowed into their Masters program.
On a couple of occasions Cleve mentioned that he had fairly significant troubles sleeping and I was impressed by how well he performed with so little good sleep. Turns out, I had undiagnosed sleep apnea myself that only got worse over the years (until I had three surgeries to significantly reduce it). During my bad apnea days there were times where I pulled myself together and rallied by remembering Cleve. I'll never be able to repay Cleve for what he did indirectly for me, much less what was direct and deliberate, but I do try to help others and will remain inspired by him until my brain no longer processes.
Re: Cleve Moler has died
#25I was lucky to have the office across the hall from him at MathWorks around 2000. He was always interested in chatting with whomever came by and learning about what they were working on. He was always a college professor at heart.
He called me into his office one day to play me a voicemail. It was Steve Jobs asking him what he could do to get MATLAB shipping on the Mac again.
MathWorks had dropped the platform because of it's then-low market share. Steve was having trouble selling Macs to universities because MATLAB was so important there. Apple ended up sending MathWorks a bunch of Macs for the build-end-test system, and MATLAB did soon return to the Mac.
Re: Cleve Moler has died
#26Amazing impact that person had. Although MATLAB probably kind of outdated these days as anything can be accomplished in Julia and Py and I remember deploying that software being deliberately made difficult by this being shareware. When I studied almost everybody ended up using MATLAB during their study and almost everybody ended up hating it when it came to publishing results and doing demonstrations.
> Although MATLAB probably kind of outdated these days as anything can be accomplished in Julia and Py.
Literally every major brand car runs code built with MATLAB and Simulink. Same goes for every modern aircraft, space vehicle, etc. Far from being outdated.
Re: Cleve Moler has died
#27Fun fact: Mathworks has never had layoffs.
Re: Cleve Moler has died
#28Cleve 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 '90…
The Pythagorean addition algorithm is iterative and really quite simple. I'm glad I looked it up:
Re: Cleve Moler has died
#29In the 1990s, I briefly met Cleve while taking a two-week Matlab course in Natick. During that course that a classmate introduced me to Python, a language where I later became a core developer.
Cleve's papers were an inspiration. I soon published my own matrix package called matfunc. That work was heavily influenced by Cleve Moler and by algorithms in Golub and Van Loan. Even my more recent Python contributions, like the super accurate math.fsum(), math.hypot(), and math.sumprod() functions, have their roots in that fertile time in the Matlab ecosystem. In particular, it newsgroups and lists of papers taught me Cleve's never ending quest to create clean front-ends for numerically sophisticated code.
Thank you Cleve. Your legacy will live forever.
Re: Cleve Moler has died
#30IMO this deserves a black banner/bar. I genuinely had no idea a single guy was behind MATLAB (or that it was so old). His contribution has been significant, to say the least.
Agreed, and disappointed not to see the black bar. Moler was one of the greats.