The 1960 programming language ALGOL 60 influenced the design of many subsequent languages, including C and a miniature language called PL/0. I based the design of the first MATLAB on PL/0.... read more >>

Fritz Bauer, eminent German computer scientist and last surviving member of the organizing committee of the 1964 Gatlingburg Conference on Numerical Algebra, passed away on March 26 at the age of 90.... read more >>

This is the third in a multi-part series on the MATLAB random number generators. MATLAB has used variants of George Marsaglia's ziggurat algorithm to generate normally distributed random numbers for almost twenty years. ... read more >>

This is the first of a multi-part series about the MATLAB random number generators.... read more >>

I came across this "ornamental geometric inequality" in a tribute to Lothar Collatz.... read more >>

Iterative refinement is a technique introduced by Wilkinson for reducing the roundoff error produced during the solution of simultaneous linear equations. Higher precision arithmetic is required for the calculation of the residuals.... read more >>

Steve Eddins has recently posted a series in his blog about colormaps. I want to add one more post. With release R2014b, we are retiring jet as the default colormap, after many years of faithful service. But did you ever wonder where jet originated, and how it came to be the default? And did you ever come across colormaps like pink and bone?... read more >>

If $n$ is odd, replace $n$ by $3n+1$, if not, replace $n$ by $n/2$. Repeat. A famous conjecture made by Lothar Collatz is that no matter what value of $n$ is chosen to start, the process eventually terminates at $n=1$. Do not expect a proof, or a counterexample, in this blog. ... read more >>

The prime spiral was discovered by Stanislaw Ulam in 1963, and featured on the cover of Scientific American in March, 1964. ... read more >>

An incredible book, published in several editions from 1909 to 1933, by German mathematicians Eugene Jahnke and Fritz Emde, contains definitions and formulas for mathematical functions, hand-calculated tables of function values, and meticulous hand-drawn 2- and 3-dimensional graphs. An English edition was published by Dover in 1945.... read more >>