How can you measure the distance between two words? How can you find the closest match to a word in a list of words? The Levenshtein distance between two strings is the number of single character deletions, insertions, or substitutions required to transform one string into the other. This is also known as the edit distance.... read more >>

A couple of questions in comments on recent blog posts have prompted me to discuss matrix condition numbers.... read more >>

The Householder meetings on Numerical Linear Algebra have been held roughly every three years since 1961. The twentieth, with the logo HHXX, was held June 18th through 23rd at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. I've been to 17 of the meetings. They have been an important part of my professional life and I've written Cleve's Corner articles and blog posts about them, MathWorks News & Notes, and Householder XIX.... read more >>

I first encountered the Hilbert matrix when I was doing individual studies under Professor John Todd at Caltech in 1960. It has been part of my professional life ever since.... read more >>

The floating point arithmetic format that requires only 16 bits of storage is becoming increasingly popular. Also known as half precision or binary16, the format is useful when memory is a scarce resource.... read more >>

A MATLAB object for arithmetic with Roman numerals provides an example of object oriented programming. I had originally intended this as my April Fools post, but I got fascinated and decided to make it the subject of a legitimate article.... read more >>

The adjacency matrix of a hypercube demonstrates the new MATLAB graph object.... read more >>

When I was in high school in the 1950's, I didn't know anything about matrices. But I nearly encountered one when I wrote a paper for my physics class about the color scheme that allowed new color TV broadcasts to be compatible with existing black-and-white TV receivers.... read more >>

(Please replace the erroneous posting from yesterday, Nov. 28, with this corrected version.)... read more >>

Here is a very short course in Linear Algebra. The Singular Value Decomposition provides a natural basis for Gil Strang's Four Fundamental Subspaces.... read more >>