# Music, Sparse Matrices, and London Billboards2

ContentsTim DavisSparse Matrix VisualizationsMusic VisualizationsMetastaseisBlue MondayElectrodoodleMorning Has BrokenBach Toccata and FugueNotesArt StudioTim DavisAt the recent SIAM conference on... read more >>

# The Tektronix 40812

The Tektronix 4081 minicomputer at Argonne National Laboratory in the summers of 1977 and '78 played an important role in the early development of MATLAB.... read more >>

# Surprising SVD, Square Waves, and Pi2

I am surprised when many of the singular values of a nonsymmetric variant of the Hilbert matrix turn out to be nearly equal to $\pi$. The explanation involves the Fourier series for a square wave.... read more >>

# Fiedler Companion Matrix

The Fiedler companion matrix distributes the coefficients of a polynomial along the diagonals of an elegant pentadiagonal matrix whose eigenvalues are equal to the zeros of the polynomial.... read more >>

# The Ardent Titan, part 22

Even though I am one of the founders of the MathWorks, I only acted as an advisor to the company for its first five years. During that time, from 1985 to 1989, I was trying my luck with two Silicon Valley computer startup companies. Both enterprises failed as businesses, but the experience taught me a great deal about the computer industry, and influenced how I viewed the eventual development of MATLAB. The second startup was known as Ardent Computer for most of its brief existence.... read more >>

# The Ardent Titan, part 13

Even though I am one of the founders of the MathWorks, I only acted as an advisor to the company for its first five years. During that time, from 1985 to 1989, I was trying my luck with two Silicon Valley computer startup companies. Both enterprises failed as businesses, but the experience taught me a great deal about the computer industry, and influenced how I viewed the eventual development of MATLAB. The second startup was known as Ardent Computer for most of its brief existence. We built a machine known as the Titan.... read more >>

# Jim Wilkinson4

I have already made several posts about gatlin, the image distributed with MATLAB of the organizing committee for the Gatlinburg III conference. From the MATLAB point of view, the first man on the left in the photo, J. H. Wilkinson, is by far the most important. From the early days of computers in the 1950s until his death in 1986, Wilkinson was the world's authority on matrix computation. His research on eigenvalue algorithms and their implementation in Algol led directly to EISPACK, the mathematical foundation for the first MATLAB.... read more >>

# George Forsythe13

Tuesday, January 8, 2013, would have been George Forsythe's 96th birthday. He passed away in 1972 at the age of 55. A pioneer in the establishment of computer science as an intellectual discipline, he was my Ph.D. thesis advisor, colleague, and friend.... read more >>