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."
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.
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.
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scientism
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.
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user_7832
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.
simoneau
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.
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BeetleB
Fun fact: Mathworks has never had layoffs.
sblank
I was honored to have worked with Cleve at Ardent Computer. He ran the benchmark and demo group squeezing performance out of thin air.
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
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.
kenty
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fun fact: Mathworks has never had layoffs.
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...
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.
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.
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.
"Clever Mole" *ggggggg*