Fun fact: Mathworks has never had layoffs.
Worked there ten years ago. Good company, well run, privately owned, employees getting a share of the success. Jack Little has steered that ship well.
Cleve Moler has died
31–34 of 34 posts
Re: Cleve Moler has died
#32An Applied Mathematician's Apology by Nick Trefethen[1] has a chapter (a couple of pages) titled "Cleve Moler and Matlab".
> I first met Cleve Moler when I was a graduate student and he visited Stanford, where his loud and friendly voice reverberated around Serra House. Moler is the antithesis of a European, and as a transatlantic soul, I love both Europeans and their antitheses. A room with Moler in it is a no-nonsense zone. He has no interest in showing you how your problem is connected with the theory of pseudodifferential operators. He just wants to get things done computationally, and nobody has done it better. Moler is about the same age as Knuth, and while Knuth was writing his great books on the analysis of discrete algorithms, Moler was creating the modern era of numerical software. He was an author of both of the foundational software packages of the 1970s, EISPACK and LINPACK, and he also published two influential software-based numerical analysis textbooks. And then, in around 1977 in the Computer Science department at the University of New Mexico, he invented Matlab, which changed the world.
I never liked using Matlab (the little I used it), but after reading this I understood better what its innovation was: “All the right algorithms would be invoked in all the right places, without the user needing to know the details.”
A footnote I found interesting:
> For me `eig(A)` epitomizes the successful contribution of numerical analysis to our technological world. Physicists, chemists, engineers, and mathematicians know that computing eigenvalues of matrices is a solved problem. Simply invoke `eig(A)`, or its equivalent in whatever language you are using, and you tap into the work of generations of numerical analysts. The algorithm involved, the QR algorithm, is completely reliable, utterly nonobvious, and amazingly fast. On my laptop, for a 1000 × 1000 matrix A, `eig(A)` computes all 1000 eigenvalues in half a second.
[1]: https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/akherim/NickApology...
Re: Cleve Moler has died
#33Amazing 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 Although MATLAB probably kind of outdated these days as anything can be accomplished in Julia and Py and I remember deploying that software being deliberately made difficult by this being shareware.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.
I don't doubt the historical usage but try deploying a Matlab program, The licensing terms and the hassle of the whole runtime are horrible and I'm not aware of any algorithm or location which could not be with reasonable ease implemented via an open language.
Re: Cleve Moler has died
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I don't doubt the historical usage but try deploying a Matlab program, The licensing terms and the hassle of the whole runtime are horrible and I'm not aware of any algorithm or location which could not be with reasonable ease implemented via an open language.
No no. MATLAB is used A LOT in industry, today, wherever advanced & embedded control is needed. Even the latest ASML chipmaking machines run on a lot of code (actively) developed in MATLAB. For real-time motion control, MATLAB+Simulink is very powerful in deploying to embedded systems through code generation with the MATLAB Coder toolboxes (which automatically turns MATLAB/Simulink stuff into C/C++). No horrible MATLAB runtime business needed then.