We all use Fourier analysis every day without even knowing it. Cell phones, disc drives, DVDs, and JPEGs all involve fast finite Fourier transforms. This post, which describes touch-tone telephone dialing, is the first of three posts about the computation and interpretation of FFTs. The posts are adapted from chapter 8 of my book, Numerical Computing with MATLAB . ... read more >>

For several years we thought Hadamard matrices showed maximum element growth for Gaussian elimination with complete pivoting. We were wrong. ... read more >>

In rare cases, Gaussian elimination with partial pivoting is unstable. But the situations are so unlikely that we continue to use the algorithm as the foundation for our matrix computations.... read more >>

Denormal floating point numbers and gradual underflow are an underappreciated feature of the IEEE floating point standard. Double precision denormals are so tiny that they are rarely numerically significant, but single precision denormals can be in the range where they affect some otherwise unremarkable computations. Historically, gradual underflow proved to be very controversial during the committee deliberations that developed the standard. ... read more >>

This is the first part of a two-part series about the single- and double precision floating point numbers that MATLAB uses for almost all of its arithmetic operations. (This post is adapted from section 1.7 of my book Numerical Computing with MATLAB, published by MathWorks and SIAM.) ... read more >>

The nineteenth Householder Symposium, Householder XIX, was held June 8-13 at Sol Cress, a conference center near Spa, Belgium. If you have been following either the web or the newletter edition of Cleve's Corner you know that the Gatlinburg/Householder series of conferences have played an important role in both my professional life and the history of MATLAB. I attended what turned out to be the third conference in the series, in Gatlinburg, Tennesse, when I was a graduate student in 1964. I have been to all 17 of the conferences that have been held since 1964. Here is a link to my News and Notes article about the Gatlinburg/Householder conferences.... read more >>

The Singular Value Decomposition of the digram frequency matrix of a text coded with a simple substitution cypher can reveal information about the vowels and consonants in the text. ... read more >>

High resolution measurements of the depth of the mold for the United States one cent coin provide an interesting data set.... read more >>

The Tektronix 4081 minicomputer at Argonne National Laboratory in the summers of 1977 and '78 played an important role in the early development of MATLAB.... read more >>

I am surprised when many of the singular values of a nonsymmetric variant of the Hilbert matrix turn out to be nearly equal to $\pi$. The explanation involves the Fourier series for a square wave.... read more >>