Our plots of the first eigenfunction of the L-shaped membrane have changed several times over the last fifty years.

Contents

1964, Stanford

Ph.D. thesis. Two dimensional contour plot. Calcomp plotter with ball-point pen drawing on paper mounted on a rotating drum.

1968, University of Michigan

Calcomp plotter. Math department individual study student project. Original 3d perspective and hidden line algorithms. Unfortunately, I don't remember the student's name.

1985, MATLAB 1.0

The first MathWorks documentation and the first surf plot. Apple Macintosh daisy wheel electric typewriter with perhaps 72 dots-per-inch resolution.

1987, MATLAB 3.5

Laser printer with much better resolution.

1992, MATLAB 4.0

Sun workstation with CRT display and color. Hot colormap, proportional to height.

1994, MATLAB 4.2

A hand made lighting model. I have to admit this looks pretty phony today.

1996, MATLAB 5.0

Good lighting and shading. But at the time this was just a nice graphics demonstration. It was a few more years before it became the official company logo.

1990, Nantucket Beach

A prototype 3d printer. Pure granular silicon, a few dozen grains per inch. (Thanks to Robin Nelson and David Eells for curating photos.)

More reading

Cleve's Corner, "The Growth of MATLAB and The MathWorks over Two Decades", MathWorks News&Notes, Jan. 2006.

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