Cleve’s Corner: Cleve Moler on Mathematics and ComputingScientific computing, math & more

This is machine translation

Translated by
Mouseover text to see original. Click the button below to return to the Original version of the page.

The MATLAB Technical Computing Environment2

Posted by Cleve Moler,

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 seventh, and final, installment.... read more >>

How Far Apart Are Two Random Points in a Square?5

Posted by Cleve Moler,

How far apart can you expect two points chosen at random in the unit square to be? I found this problem on the YouTube channel maintained by Presh Talwalkar, Mind Your Decisions. He correctly calls it a very hard puzzle. At first, I guessed the answer might be $1/2$. But the correct answer is more interesting than that.... read more >>

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 >>