Why are manhole covers round? It is so they won't fall through the hole they are intended to cover. They have the same diameter regardless of where it is measured. If the hole has a slightly smaller diameter, it is not possible to orient the cover so that it will fall through. A square or rectangular cover can be turned slightly and it will easily fit through the hole.... read more >>

Sedona Arizona is a perfect site for the first MathWorks excursion into lifestyle products.... 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 >>

Mandelbrot sports a new red, green and gold colormap to celebrate the holidays.... read more >>

MathWorks is creating a deck of playing cards that will be offered as gifts at our trade show booths. The design of the cards is based on Penrose Tilings and plots of the Finite Fourier Transform Matrix.... read more >>

Create a MATLAB® graph object from information about neighbors among the 48 contiguous states in the USA.... read more >>

If you follow this blog regularly, you know that I love fractals. I recently spent a pleasant afternoon in Nashua, New Hampshire, where my daughter Teresa introduced me to Gregory Searle, a fractal artist and computer geek. Here is his logo.... read more >>

I first saw this game years ago in the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco. You are given a computer screen with two color patches and three sliders. One of the color patches is fixed. The sliders control the red, green and blue components of the other patch. Your task is to adjust the sliders until the two patches are the same color. It ain't easy.... 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.... read more >>

Let me tell you about a beautiful, fractal curve, the Dragon Curve. Download my new dragon program from the File Exchange and follow along.... read more >>