# Bug in Half-Precision Floating Point Object

My post on May 8 was about "half-precision" and "quarter-precision" arithmetic. I also added code for objects fp16 and fp8 to Cleve's Laboratory. A few days ago I heard from Pierre Blanchard and my good friend Nick Higham at the University of Manchester about a serious bug in the constructors for those objects.... read more >>

# Wilkinson and Reinsch Handbook on Linear Algebra

The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages, SIGPLAN, expects to hold the fourth in a series of conferences on the History of Programming Languages in 2020, see HOPL-IV. The first drafts of papers are to be submitted by August, 2018. That long lead time gives me the opportunity to write a detailed history of MATLAB. I plan to write the paper in sections, which I'll post in this blog as they are available.... read more >>

# Three-Term Recurrence Relations and Bessel Functions

Three-term recurrence relations are the basis for computing Bessel functions. Contents A Familiar Three-Term Recurrence Friedrich Bessel Bessel Functions Miller's Algorithm ... read more >>

# Two Other MATLABs, in Bangladesh and in Hindi2

This post is about the words "Matlab" and "matlab", in upper and lower case, and without a trademark symbol. Matlab with a capital "M" is a district in Bangladesh. "matlab" with a lower case "m" is a common word in the Hindi language. ... read more >>

# My First Computer, the Burroughs 205 Datatron1

The first computer that I seriously used was the Burroughs 205 Datatron. I actually used two different machines, one at Caltech for two years in 1959-61 and one at the University of Utah in the summer of 1960. Both the technology and the style of usage were wildly different from today's computers.... read more >>

# How Far Apart Are Two Random Points in a Hypercube?3

Two days ago I wrote about random points in a square. At the last minute I added the paragraph asking about the generalization to random points in a cube. I have to admit that I didn't check the Web to see what was known about the question.... read more >>

# How Far Apart Are Two Random Points in a Square?5

How far apart can you expect two points chosen at random in the unit square to be? I found this problem on the YouTube channel maintained by Presh Talwalkar, Mind Your Decisions. He correctly calls it a very hard puzzle. At first, I guessed the answer might be $1/2$. But the correct answer is more interesting than that.... read more >>

# A Logo Zoetrope

A Logo ZoetropeA quick post to point my readers to Ned Gulley's post in MATLAB Community, A Galloping Logo Zoetrope. Don't know what a Zoetrope is? Ned explains.Get the MATLAB code (requires... read more >>