Today is Easter Sunday. Why? How is the date of Easter determined?... 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 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 >>

Leslie Fox (1918-1992) is a British numerical analyst who was a contemporary of three men who played such an important role in my education and early professional life, John Todd, George Forsythe, and Jim Wilkinson. Although I saw less of Fox than I did of the others, he was still an important influence in my life.... read more >>

Three-term recurrence relations are the basis for computing Bessel functions.... 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 >>

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've long known that my Erdös Number is 3. This means that the length of the path on the graph of academic coauthorship between me and mathematician Paul Erdös is 3. Somewhat to my surprise, I recently discovered that I can also trace a chain of coauthorship to Donald J. Trump. My Trump number is 5.... read more >>

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