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 >>

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 >>

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 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 first computer that I seriously used was the Burroughs 205 Datatron. I actually used two different machines, one at Caltech for two years in 1959-61 and one at the University of Utah in the summer of 1960. Both the technology and the style of usage were wildly different from today's computers.... read more >>

Do not get involved in a bar bet with Brad Efron and his dice until you have read this.... read more >>