17 条评论
- generuso 18小时前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."
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-...
- MatteoFrigo 17小时前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.
- mike-the-mikado 10小时前The Pythagorean addition algorithm is iterative and really quite simple. I'm glad I looked it up:
- ozgung 16小时前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.
- bachmeier 12小时前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.
- jeremyjh 16小时前I didn’t know his name but certainly knew about MATLAB. He sounds worthy of a black bar to me.
- aaron695 12小时前[dead]
- nmdeadhead 11小时前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.
- KenoFischer 21小时前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.
- leopd 15小时前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
- user_7832 19小时前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.
- pantulis 5小时前Agreed, and disappointed not to see the black bar. Moler was one of the greats.
- raymondh 6小时前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.
Thank you Cleve. Your legacy will live forever.
- scientism 17小时前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.
- raverbashing 16小时前Yes (and Simulink helped a lot)
I mean of course you can do them all without simulink but it was much easier
- ktpsns 16小时前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.
- cdavid 14小时前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.
- simoneau 11小时前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.
- simoneau 11小时前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.
- simoneau 11小时前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."
- sblank 20小时前I was honored to have worked with Cleve at Ardent Computer. He ran the benchmark and demo group squeezing performance out of thin air.
Great 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...
- BeetleB 10小时前Fun fact: Mathworks has never had layoffs.
- sveme 4小时前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.
- svat 2小时前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.
[1]: https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/akherim/NickApology...
- newswasboring 18小时前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.
- ktallett 20小时前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.
- roter 15小时前[dead]
- hoorayToday 17小时前[dead]
- kenty 18小时前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.
- bsoles 11小时前> 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.
- indianbunghole 11小时前"Clever Mole" *ggggggg*