If you visit the Community Contests page, you'll see there have been three different "Mini Hack" contests. These are games where you get a little text area for some MATLAB code that makes cool... read more >> ..read more

Tim Marston is the 1st-prize winner of 2023 MATLAB Mini Hack contest. His contest entries not only showcase his MATLAB skills and creativity, but also inspire many others to create entries in the... read more >> ..read more

This is a guest post to celebrate International Women in Engineering Day on June 23rd. Written by Alexandra Martinez Rodriguez, Senior UX Researcher, MathWorks and Ruth Faherty, Advanced Support Engineer, MathWorks. This May, the Women's Affinity Group at MathWorks - Northern Europe chapter hosted a breakfast mixer that served as a platform for empowerment, networking, and insightful discussions within the tech community. The affinity group aims to promote a diverse and inclusive environment to nurture the growth and development of Women at MathWorks, enable a sense of belonging, and recognize ..read more

Zhaoxu Liu / slandarer is a winner of the 2023 MATLAB Mini Hack contest and an active contributor to the File Exchange and Discussions. Zhaoxu’s creative Mini Hack contest entries amazed and impressed the community. His many File  Exchange submissions have high ratings and have accumulated more than 10,000 downloads. We were delighted to catch up with him and learn more about his use of MATLAB. This conversation is between Zhaoxu Liu and our own Chen Lin. Thank you for taking the time to participate in this interview. Please tell us about yourself. I am an undergraduate student at the Oc ..read more

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