Posts 201 - 210 of 305

Zeroin, Part 2: Brent’s Version 2

Richard Brent's improvements to Dekker's zeroin algorithm, published in 1971, made it faster, safer in floating point arithmetic, and guaranteed not to fail. ... read more >>

Zeroin, Part 1: Dekker’s Algorithm

Th. J. Dekker's zeroin algorithm from 1969 is one of my favorite algorithms. An elegant technique combining bisection and the secant method for finding a zero of a function of a real variable, it has become fzero in MATLAB today. This is the first of a three part series.... read more >>

Charles Lawson, 1931 – 2015

Chuck Lawson passed away in July at the age of 83. Chuck was one of the people who introduced me to computing and mathematical software. I worked for him at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the summers of 1961 and 1962, just before and after my first year in grad school.... read more >>

Trip Report: Trefethen Birthday Conference 4

"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 >>

Golub Matrices, Deceptively Ill Conditioned

I got the idea for these test matrices from Gene Golub years ago, but the mathematical foundation comes from a paper by Divakar Viswanath and Nick Trefethen. ... read more >>

Tumbling Box ODE 2

A rectangular box, such as a book or a cell phone, thrown in the air can tumble stably about its longest axis, or about its shortest axis, but not about its middle axis.... read more >>

Discover e with a graphical experiment

An interactive graphical experiment lets you discover the value of one of the most important numerical quantities in mathematics. ... read more >>

Trip Report: NACONF 2015 and Sparse Days III

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 >>

Dubrulle Creates A Faster Tridiagonal QR Algorithm

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 >>

ALGOL 60, PL/0 and MATLAB 1

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 >>

Posts 201 - 210 of 305

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