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.... 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 >>

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 >>