"New Directions in Numerical Computation" was a conference in celebration of Nick Trefethen's 60th birthday held August 25-28 in the new Andrew Wiles building, which houses the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford.... read more >>

I have just returned from two meetings in Europe, the 26th Biennial Conference on Numerical Analysis at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, and Sparse Days III in Saint-Girons, France.... read more >>

Augustin (Austin) Dubrulle deserves to be better known in the numerical linear algebra community. His version of the implicit QR algorithm for computing the eigenvalues of a symmetric tridiagonal matrix that was published in a half-page paper in Numerische Mathematik in 1970 is faster than Wilkinson's version published earlier. It is still a core algorithm in MATLAB today. ... read more >>

The 1960 programming language ALGOL 60 influenced the design of many subsequent languages, including C and a miniature language called PL/0. I based the design of the first MATLAB on PL/0.... read more >>

Fritz Bauer, eminent German computer scientist and last surviving member of the organizing committee of the 1964 Gatlingburg Conference on Numerical Algebra, passed away on March 26 at the age of 90.... read more >>

This is the third in a multi-part series on the MATLAB random number generators. MATLAB has used variants of George Marsaglia's ziggurat algorithm to generate normally distributed random numbers for almost twenty years. ... read more >>

This is the first of a multi-part series about the MATLAB random number generators.... read more >>

I came across this "ornamental geometric inequality" in a tribute to Lothar Collatz.... read more >>

If $n$ is odd, replace $n$ by $3n+1$, if not, replace $n$ by $n/2$. Repeat. A famous conjecture made by Lothar Collatz is that no matter what value of $n$ is chosen to start, the process eventually terminates at $n=1$. Do not expect a proof, or a counterexample, in this blog. ... read more >>

The prime spiral was discovered by Stanislaw Ulam in 1963, and featured on the cover of Scientific American in March, 1964. ... read more >>