This week it’s my pleasure to welcome guest poster, Ned Gulley. Ned is the guru behind all sorts of neat projects including social computing, the File Exchange, MATLAB contests, etc. Today he writes about presenting “MATLAB, the Web, and the World” at a recent MATLAB Conference in England. Use the comments to let us know what MATLAB serendipity you have encountered on the internet!

I recently had the pleasure of giving a presentation at the MATLAB Conference in London. In fact, the conference was at Wembley Stadium, so all of us who presented get to say “I played Wembley” for the rest of our careers. I’d like for you to imagine 90,000 fist-pumping MATLAB fans cheering us on as we worked our demos on the main stage, but the actual venue was a somewhat smaller conference facility inside the stadium. We did, however, have a view of the pitch, and we were treated to a very entertaining tour of the stadium. This is a picture of a few of us in the Royal Box.

As I understand it, the Queen doesn’t attend many soccer matches, but if she were to, this is where she would sit. Perhaps she’ll watch England prevail here in 2018.

The MathWorks UK office did a fantastic job running the conference. The proceedings are now online. I found the invited talks by customers to be especially interesting. My own talk was about the MATLAB community: “MATLAB, the Web, and the World”. The talk touched on our own site, MATLAB Central, as well as other places on the web where MATLAB pops up, which increasingly means Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. And although each of these individual “places” on the web is worth a long discussion, my favorite stories are the ones where multiple sites mix together into a single wandering storyline. Here’s one such story from the end of my talk:

While reading Loren’s blog one day, I came across a reference to Ankur Pawar’s beautiful Flickr site, where he displays MATLAB typography and gorgeous domain colorings and many other marvels. From here, I was able to find his personal web site, which includes code for doing textures and patterns in MATLAB. Then I found his File Exchange page, including the source code for his complex plane domain coloring. A short while later I was using his code to render some of our old complex plane demos.

[Click to Embiggen]

From blog to Flickr to File Exchange to working code all in the space of a few minutes… that’s the kind of delightful serendipity that can happen when you’re part of the MATLAB community.