Loren on the Art of MATLAB

February 17th, 2009

Experiments with MATLAB - The Book

Quite a few MATLAB users that I meet these days want to know if The MathWorks has a toolbox for their precocious teenagers. Currently, there is not such product. However, Cleve Moler, cofounder of The MathWorks, has a book, Experiments with MATLAB that you might find suitable.

Cleve is an engaging writer; his love for math and teaching shine through. Cleve has written other books as well. Prior to Experiments with MATLAB, Cleve most recently wrote Numerical Computing with MATLAB.

Cleve's audience for each of these books is quite different; the former intended for high school and early college, the latter for an introduction to numerical methods. You may notice that the these two books share some chapters with the same titles, e.g., "Linear Equations." Despite the naming similarities, Cleve focuses appropriately in each book on the intended audience.

In Experiments you will see a 7-page chapter using a high school level word problem to motivate the discussion. In contrast, Cleve spends about 40 pages on the equivalent chapter in the Numerical Computing book for the equivalent chapter.

Here's a list of the chapters.

Tell us your experiences of teaching your high school kids to use MATLAB. What sorts of problems did they work on? What was easy? What was hard? Let us know here.

Update: High school students can purchase and use the Student Version, which is available for a pretty good price and delivered by download at the MathWorks store ($99).


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a = magic(3);
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</pre>

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Loren Shure works on design of the MATLAB language at The MathWorks. She writes here about once a week on MATLAB programming and related topics.

  • Loren: Paul- There *are* issues depending on the sizes of ii and jj. And it’s a bit complicated, but really...
  • Loren: Bob- You don’t say what happens when you run your code. Can you please explain more. It looks like you...
  • Loren: Kishore- It is not clear to me what you are trying to actually achieve. If you want to concatenate the 4...
  • Kishore: sorry, in the previous code mat2cell(c,[19 121],[19 134],[19 84],[19 107])
  • Kishore: Hi Loren, Why does the following not work? data_classwise = [19x121 double] [19x134 double] [19x84 double]...
  • Paul Jackson: Loren, Are there any aspects of empty matrices that may be tricky when they are used as indices into...
  • Bob: Hi Lori, Im trying to process Unicode text files from more than one different locales than the standard latin...
  • Loren: Ben- The reference link in my post documents the behavior of sum([]) and prod([]) (although the prod part only...
  • Ben: Loren/Andrey, A further advantage of having sum([])==0 and prod([])==1 is that it’s consistent with array...
  • Loren: OysterEngineer- I will SO take you up on that offer. Can’t wait for a good reason to visit now....

These postings are the author's and don't necessarily represent the opinions of The MathWorks.