For the past month I have been working with the variable format 16-bit floating point arithmetic that I described in this post. It has been frustrating work. I have found that the limited precision and limited range of half precision make it barely usable for the kind of experiments with matrix computation that I like to do. In this post I will describe a few of these experiments.... read more >>

This is a short post to point to a web site in the Netherlands, VAXBARN. The site proprietor, Camiel Vanderhoeven, is assembling a collection of historically interesting computers.... read more >>

Camille Jordan (1838-1922)... read more >>

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. This is the second such installment.... read more >>

The adjacency matrix of a hypercube demonstrates the new MATLAB graph object.... read more >>

A few days ago we received email from Mike Hennessey, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has been reading my book “Numerical Computing with MATLAB” very carefully. Chapter 7 is about “Eigenvalues and Singular Values” and section 10.3 is about one of my all-time favorite MATLAB demos, eigshow. Mike discovered an error in my description of the svd option of eigshow that has gone unnoticed in the over ten years that the book has been available from both the MathWorks web site and SIAM…. read more >>

During the SIAM Annual Meeting this summer in Boston there will be a special minisymposium Wednesday afternoon, July 13, honoring Charlie Van Loan, who is retiring at Cornell. (I use "at" because he's not leaving Ithaca.) I will give a talk titled "19 Dubious Way to Compute the Zeros of a Polynomial", following in the footsteps of the paper about the matrix exponential that Charlie and I wrote in 1978 and updated 25 years later. I really don't have 19 ways to compute polynomial zeros, but then I only have a half hour for my talk. Most of the methods have been described previously in this blog. Today's post is mostly about "roots".... read more >>

What does $\sqrt[12]{2}$ have to do with music? What are equal temperament and just intonation? How can the MATLAB function rats help tune a piano? (This post is based in part on the Music chapter in my online book, Experiments in MATLAB.)… read more >>

A model of the human gait, developed by Nikolaus Troje, is a five-term Fourier series with vector-valued coefficients that are the principal components for data obtained in motion capture experiments involving subjects walking on a treadmill.... read more >>

When a deck of playing cards is shuffled perfectly, the result is not random. A perfect shuffle places the cards in a mathematically precise order. As a result, when the most common version of a perfect shuffle is repeated eight times, the deck returns to its original state.... read more >>