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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Published with MATLAB® 7.7

By Loren Shure

17:24 UTC | Posted in Education | Permalink |

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a = magic(3);
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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.

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Recent Comments

  • Jun: I totally can not believe it, Loren. You are really helpful. Thank you so much, MATLAB master!
  • Loren: Wow folks- Always lots of interest when there’s a quickie to try out! I will only make 2 general...
  • Loren: Jun- ismember is your friend here: >> [aa,ind] = ismember(Array2,Arra y1) aa = 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ind = 1 2 1 4 4 3...
  • Dan: I like the first way better than the second way. Combining the arrays into one and running any is nice, although...
  • James Myatt: How about I = (a == 0 | b == 0); a(I) = []; b(I) = [];
  • Tunc: Hello Loren, love your blog because of such inspiring and challenging comments to such ’small’...
  • Pekka Kumpulainen: Here is my tradeoff. I usually want to keep the original variables as they are most probably...
  • Iain: Followup: Of course, to allow NaNs (counting them as non-zero): mask = (a~=0) & (b~=0); The mask says “a...
  • Matt Fig: I would usually go with something like this: y = a&b; x = a(y); y = b(y); But I was surprised to find...
  • kk: c=all([a;b]) a(c) a(b)

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