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 second of a multi-part series about the MATLAB random number generators. If you ask for help rng, you will get lots of information, including the fact that there are three modern generators.... read more >>

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

My experience with the forthcoming MATLAB watch exceeds my most optimistic expectations. The watch has not yet been announced officially, but a few of us have been testing prototypes for the past several weeks.... read more >>

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

Single and double precision are combined to facilitate a triple precision accumulated inner product.... read more >>

Iterative refinement is a technique introduced by Wilkinson for reducing the roundoff error produced during the solution of simultaneous linear equations. Higher precision arithmetic is required for the calculation of the residuals.... read more >>

Steve Eddins has recently posted a series in his blog about colormaps. I want to add one more post. With release R2014b, we are retiring jet as the default colormap, after many years of faithful service. But did you ever wonder where jet originated, and how it came to be the default? And did you ever come across colormaps like pink and bone?... 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 >>