This is a summary of my talk at the conference Celebrating the Centenary of James H. Wilkinson's Birth at the University of Manchester, May 29.... read more >>

On May 29-30, I plan to attend a conference, organized by Nick Higham, at the University of Manchester. The title of the conference is... read more >>

I recently acquired a GPU, a graphics processing unit. It's called a GPU because such processors were originally intended to speed up graphics. But MATLAB uses it to speed up computation. Let's see how the gpuArray object benchmarks on my machine. I have been doing computer benchmarks for years. I like to do profiles where I vary the size of a task and see how the amount of memory required affects performance. I always learn something unexpected when I do these profiles. Ben Todoroff is on the MathWorks Parallel Processing team. Last year he contributed #34080, gpuBench to the MATLAB Central File Exchange. He has been able to compare several different GPUs. I am going to consider the performance of only one GPU, but in more detail. Important note. This is only about double precision. Single precision is another story. ... read more >>

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 >>

I probably first saw this matrix in 1960 in John Todd's class at Caltech. But I forgot about it until Tahar Loulou jogged my memory with a comment following my blog post in late May. It deserves a place in our gallery of interesting matrices.... 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.... read more >>

The Wikipedia article on Pascal's Triangle has hundreds of properties of the triangle and there are dozens of other Web pages devoted to it. Here are a few facts that I find most interesting. ... read more >>

In the 1970s and early 1980s, while I was working on the LINPACK and EISPACK projects that I discussed in two previous posts, I was a Professor of Mathematics and then of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. I was teaching courses in Linear Algebra and Numerical Analysis. I wanted my students to have easy access to LINPACK and EISPACK without writing Fortran programs. By "easy access" I meant not going through the remote batch processing and the repeated edit-compile-link-load-execute process that was ordinarily required on the campus central mainframe computer.... 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 third such installment.... read more >>