How very sad. Whilst not my piece of software of choice, it is definitely still used by plenty to do cool work. I do think it will eventually be surpassed by Python and Julia but it still has it's place right now.
IMO 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.
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 lines of code in FORTRAN.
Engineering students loved it so much that he decided to make a company around this product. His buddy expanded and rewrote the interpreter in C, for a PC, and the rest is history:
"In 1983 Jack Little suggested the creation of a commercial product based on MATLAB. I said I thought that was a good idea, but I didn't join him initially. The IBM PC had been introduced only two years earlier and was barely powerful enough to run something like MATLAB, but Little anticipated its evolution. He left his job, bought a Compaq PC clone at Sears, moved into the hills behind Stanford, and, with my encouragement, spent a year and a half creating a new and extended version of MATLAB written in C. A friend, Steve Bangert, joined the project and worked on the new MATLAB in his spare time."
I feel sad by this. I have a strong love hate relationship with MATLAB. I think that happens with anything you use for 15 years. But I have always respected the software and its professional quality documentation. On the business side he created kind of a perfect existence for himself. A profitable company which they have still kept private so they can focus on things they want to solve.
Amazing 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 Although MATLAB probably kind of outdated these days as anything can be accomplished in Julia and Py and I remember deploying that software being deliberately made difficult by this being shareware.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.
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.
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.
I 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.
Cleve 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.
In 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.
An 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.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 37.8 ms ] threadGreat mathematician and a wonderful human being. I never stopped learning when I was around him. thttps://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2013/11/25/the-ardent-tita...
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 lines of code in FORTRAN.
Engineering students loved it so much that he decided to make a company around this product. His buddy expanded and rewrote the interpreter in C, for a PC, and the rest is history:
"In 1983 Jack Little suggested the creation of a commercial product based on MATLAB. I said I thought that was a good idea, but I didn't join him initially. The IBM PC had been introduced only two years earlier and was barely powerful enough to run something like MATLAB, but Little anticipated its evolution. He left his job, bought a Compaq PC clone at Sears, moved into the hills behind Stanford, and, with my encouragement, spent a year and a half creating a new and extended version of MATLAB written in C. A friend, Steve Bangert, joined the project and worked on the new MATLAB in his spare time."
User guide for the original version of MATLAB: https://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2018/02/05/the-historic-ma...
The source code of the very early (1982?) FORTRAN version of MATLAB: https://github.com/johnsonjh/matlab
The origins of the first PC version: https://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2018/03/09/matlab-history-...
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.
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.
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.
> 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...