The Game of Life, including the infinitely expanding universe, is a gorgeous application of MATLAB sparse matrices.... read more >>

This is part one of a series of posts about John Conway's Game of Life. One deceptively simple rule leads to an incredible variety of patterns, puzzles, and unsolved mathematical problems, and a beautiful use of MATLAB sparse matrices. ... read more >>

The first MATLAB trade show booth at the CDC in December, 1984, included a potted palm.... read more >>

This is the third part of a series of posts about Marc Kac's 1966 paper in the American Mathematical Monthly [1]. This part is devoted to the proof that the drums have the same eigenvalues. ... read more >>

This is the second part of a series of posts about Marc Kac's 1966 paper in the American Mathematical Monthly [1]. This part is devoted to contour plots of the eigenfunctions. ... read more >>

The title of this multi-part posting is also the title of a 1966 article by Marc Kac in the American Mathematical Monthly [1]. This first part is about isospectrality. ... read more >>

How do you compute the hypotenuse of a right triangle without squaring the lengths of the sides and without taking any square roots?... read more >>

I have been interested in the computation of the matrix exponential, $e^A$, for a long time. A recent query from a user provides a provocative example.... read more >>

MATLAB has two different functions for piecewise cubic interpolation, spline and pchip. Why are there two? How do they compare? ... read more >>

We all know that Friday the 13th is unlucky, but is it unlikely?... read more >>