He says when he saw a license plate number he liked to factor it in his head. He was also interested in amateur radio and built his own equipment. At high school he got a job as a TV cameraman. He did well at school and was second in a state-wide maths competition, which stood him in good stead when he applied to CalTech to study mathematics.
He had turned down a place at MIT, deciding he liked the smaller school better. It was a very important place to me and I made a lot of friends. I was active in student affairs and edited the student paper. Any contact with the faculty was through Richard Feynman. I also went to classes given by Linus Pauling, who taught chemistry.
Moler decided he wanted to be a science writer, partly because both his parents were journalists. He had never considered a career as a mathematician. But then he was introduced to computers by John Todd, an Irishman who had worked on the Enigma code-breaking effort during WW2.
I wrote my first computer programme in I always think I used computers for what God had intended them for, to do arithmetic. While there, he got to meet Jim Wilkinson, who was a visiting lecturer.
Wilkinson was one of the true pioneers, who had worked with Alan Turing at the National Physical Laboratory in London, and was a real inspiration to Moler. He spent some time working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the time they were working on the moon shots. He had started working on matrix computation, because he realised it were important to many aspects of applied mathematics. He had never wanted to be a pure mathematician, and always saw mathematics for how it can be applied in the real world.
After a year he returned to the US and looked for a job. I got lots of job offers and even considered working for IBM. He got married to a woman who had been in the graduate programme of the computer science department and was now looking for an academic position. Moler could have stayed at Michigan, but they decided to find somewhere where both could get a job.
They were both offered positions at the University of New Mexico. He admits it was a move to a less established department, but he had contacts at Los Alamos so he set about building it up. But fate would intervene. I was put into the maths department and she was in the computer science department, so we did not have to have anything to do with each other professionally. She eventually left and I became chairman of the computer science department.
He had been working on the early ideas for what would become Matlab while in Michigan in , but it was his time in New Mexico where it really started to take shape. He got a book on the subject of parsing and started to create his own programming language.
I came up with a very simple design. I had not intended it to become some powerful thing. I had simple-minded objectives and approaches. The original Matlab was just a couple of thousand lines of code and was designed for people to modify to their needs. Other MathWorks country sites are not optimized for visits from your location. Toggle Main Navigation. About MathWorks. Search MathWorks. Close Mobile Search. Toggle Main Navigation.
Technical Articles and Newsletters. Search MathWorks. Close Mobile Search. Contact sales. The Burroughs Datatron, , a vacuum tube computer with 4, words of magnetic drum memory. Programs for the Datatron were written in absolute numeric machine language and punched on paper tape.
A few punched cards from a Fortran program for solving simultaneous linear equations, 15 years before the introduction of the MATLAB backslash operator. All six members of the committee — J.
Wilkinson describing a matrix algorithm to an audience at Argonne in the early s. Many of the first plots were made by printing asterisks on the teletypes and typewriters that served as terminals.
The Tektronix , A step on the way from time-sharing to workstations and PCs. The three of us founded The MathWorks in California in Learn More. Select a Web Site Choose a web site to get translated content where available and see local events and offers. Select web site.
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