My erstwhile colleague Steve Eddins recently retired from MathWorks after a long and illustrious career. And once he was finally free of the office, what did he long to do? Maybe a few rounds of golf every morning? Or paddle slowly down the Charles River in a canoe stocked with beer, chips, and a copy of his favorite book? No, he wanted to knock out some MATLAB code and write about it. Just like the good old days! I know all this because Steve has already set up a personal MATLAB blog: Matrix Values. I was especially interested in his second post, Initialize a MATLAB Toolbox. In it, he descri ..read more

Recently I've seen a number of fractal images created with Newton's method. For instance, Daniel Pereira had two spectacular animations in the recent Flipbook Mini-Hack contest. Rotating Newton's Fractal (3rd power) Rotating Newton's Fractal (4th power) Here's another example of the kind of picture I'm talking about. How is such an image made? What does it represent? It's one of those things where complexity is hiding behind something that, on its face, seems straightforward. To motivate this, consider this question: How do you find the roots of this polynomial? x3 - 2·x2 - 11·x + 12. That ..read more

The MATLAB AI Chat Playground is ready for you to experiment with Generative AI, answer questions, and write initial draft MATLAB® code. All of us on the community team share a guiding principle. We wake up every day thinking about how we can help our users accelerate their pace of learning and building. ChatGPT, Generative AI, and large-language model (LLM) technology have been sweeping forces, and we see this amazing technology as a tool that, if applied correctly, can help users find answers, get initial drafts of code, and help break down complex engineering problems. We spent this year li ..read more

Today we're launching a new contest here on MATLAB Central: the MATLAB Flipbook Mini Hack. Why flipbook? It's an animation contest in which each animation gets exactly 48 frames, so it's like flipping through a 48-page pad of paper with slightly different drawings on each page. Check it out: entries are already pouring in! In this post, I want to demonstrate some coding techniques that can make your animations easier. Suppose, for example, you wanted to animate a dot moving in a circle. Here the variable f is the frame number. It will take on the values from 1 to 48. f = 1:48; We want to use ..read more

I like to play Cody because I always learn something. After I've solved a problem, I spend a little time with the Solution Map looking at other solutions. It doesn't take long to find something better, and often I learn about a function that I never knew existed. For instance, have you ever heard of the function ISSORTED? It's a simple function, but it was new to me. Let me tell you how I first learned about it. Along the way, I'll tell you about a new trick for finding good Cody solutions. Let's consider Cody Problem 10, which is about monotonically increasing vectors. Here's the problem stat ..read more

The File Exchange provides access to more than 46,000 free MATLAB projects. For 33,854 of these projects, the authors included the word "toolbox" in the title. "Toolbox" is clearly a useful designation in the MATLAB community! But what exactly IS a toolbox? It's always been a little vague. The closest thing we've had to a universal definition is this: a folder containing some related and potentially useful MATLAB files. This definition applies to everything from a sophisticated commercial product to a couple of modest utilities tossed into a folder. The salient point about a toolbox is that it ..read more

Today's guest article is by Hans Scharler. Live Interview on Discord Recently, I had the privilege of engaging in a captivating conversation with Heather Gorr, Ph.D., a senior MATLAB Product Manager and Data Science expert at MathWorks. Our discussion covered a broad range of topics, from her daily work routine to her personal journey into the world of data science. I held the interview live on the MATLAB Discord Server. I even kicked off the AMA with a Lex Fridman-inspired podcast introduction. Today we're privileged to be joined by Heather, a force in the world of data science, a Senior MA ..read more

Today's guest article is by Wesley Hamilton, a STEM Outreach engineer here at MathWorks. Wesley's roles involve popularizing the use of MATLAB and Simulink for younger folk, especially towards mathematical topics, and this blog is an accompanying piece to a workshop being run by the National Museum of Math in New York City. Sudoku is a popular puzzle in which puzzlers fill in a 9x9 grid with the digits 1-9 such that a number of conditions are met: each 3x3 subgrid, row, and column must contain all digits. While Sudoku is usually referred to as a logic puzzle, it is actually possible to recast ..read more

Earlier this year I wrote about solving word ladders with MATLAB. There was a lot of interest in that post, so I thought I'd share my investigations regarding another word-based app. In this script, I'm trying to create a puzzle modeled on the NY Times Spelling Bee game. Here is the premise: you are given seven letters, and your job is to find all possible words you can make with those seven letters. You can use letters more than once, but they must be four or more letters long, and they must all include the special center letter. Every Spelling Bee puzzle has at least one "pangram", which is ..read more

Today's guest article is by Adam Danz whose name you might recognize from the MATLAB Central community. Adam is a developer on the MATLAB Graphics and Charting team. About 20 years ago Adam memorized pi to a measly 200 decimal places which is 1/50 of the digits he'll visualize today using MATLAB. It's March 14th. Let's get irrational. Today is pi day, the most popular irrational number at any party, transcendental to all number systems, with an infinite number of decimal places. But how many decimal places are needed? NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses 15 decimal places of pi for interpla ..read more