It's reached that time for me. I will be retiring from MathWorks at the end of March 2022. It's been 35 years of tremendous growth for MathWorks, and for me. When I started this blog, the original stipulation was I needed to produce 5 posts to show that I had more than 1 or 2 in my head. That was 17 years ago! I just reread my inaugural post and it rings as true today as it did then. I still love math and linear algebra. I've had the great good fortune to work with MathWorks founders, including my colleague and friend, Cleve Moler. I am grateful to Jack Little, who gave me (or I took!) opport ..read more

Today's guest blogger is Matt Tearle, who works on the team that creates our online training content, such as our various Onramp courses to get you started on MATLAB, Simulink, and applications. Matt has written several blog posts here in the past, usually prompted by a puzzle - and today is no different.STUMP (v: to cause to be at a loss; baffle)Wordle. It has captured us all. When Adam wrote his post about using MATLAB to solve Wordle puzzles, I had been thinking about doing exactly the same thing. (In the past, I have written code to cheat at Wordscapes and the NY Times Spelling Bee puzzle ..read more

Today's guest blogger is Adam Filion, a Senior Data Scientist at MathWorks. Adam has worked on many areas of data science at MathWorks, including helping customers understand and implement data science techniques, managing and prioritizing our development efforts, building Coursera classes, and leading internal data science projects.My wife recently introduced me to the addictive puzzle game Wordle. In the game, you make a series of guesses to figure out the day's secret answer word. The answer is always a five letter English word, and you have six attempts to guess the right answer. After ea ..read more

In the early 1990s, to avoid eval and all of its quirks (if you don't know about this, DON'T look it up - it's totally discouraged), we recommended using feval for evaluating functions that might not be known until supplied by the user running the code. We used this, for example, for evaluating numeric integrals. We wanted to leave the integrand completely flexible and up to the user. Yet the integrator had to be able to evaluate the user function, an unknown at the time of creating the integrator.function I=integ(fcn,fmin,fmax,tol)if ~ischar(fcn) error(...)end% figure out some initial points ..read more

In the early 1990s, to avoid eval and all of its quirks (if you don't know about this, DON'T look it up - it's totally discouraged), we recommended using feval for evaluating functions that might not be known until supplied by the user running the code. We used this, for example, for evaluating numeric integrals. We wanted to leave the integrand completely flexible and up to the user. Yet the integrator had to be able to evaluate the user function, an unknown at the time of creating the integrator.function I=integ(fcn,fmin,fmax,tol)if ~ischar(fcn) error(...)end% figure out some initial points ..read more

Benefits of Refactoring CodeI have seen a lot of code in my life, including code from many different people written for many different purposes, and in many different "styles". These styles range from quick-and-dirty (I only need to do this once), to fully optimized, documented, and tested (I want this to last a long time while other people use it). For me, I have found, a bit more than I expected, that the quick-and-dirty quickly morphs into something being useful and used a lot, but without the thought and care of making sure the code is really up to the task.Today I want to argue why, as s ..read more

Seventeen? Why 17? Well, as a high school student, I attended HCSSIM, a summer program for students interested in math. There we learned all kinds of math you don't typically learn about until much later in your studies. One of the reference books was Calculus on Manifolds by Michael Spivak. Inside, you learn some of the mysteries of algebra, and, if you read carefully, you will find references to both yellow pigs and the number 17. I leave it as a challenge to you to learn more about either or both if you are interested.As I went to college, the number 17 was a part of my life. Looking throu ..read more

Seventeen? Why 17? Well, as a high school student, I attended HCSSIM, a summer program for students interested in math. There we learned all kinds of math you don't typically learn about until much later in your studies. One of the reference books was Calculus on Manifolds by Michael Spivak. Inside, you learn some of the mysteries of algebra, and, if you read carefully, you will find references to both yellow pigs and the number 17. I leave it as a challenge to you to learn more about either or both if you are interested.As I went to college, the number 17 was a part of my life. Looking throu ..read more

Today I want to introduce you to Jake Mitchell, a MATLAB user that I knew of and someone recently reminded me of again. Jake is a mechanical engineering major who is interested in data science. He uses MATLAB to explore strategies and positions in various games, and then writes about it. As he does, he shows the core code for the way pieces move and the game unfolds. Games with Simple RulesJake has really nice commentary about possible strategies, based on simulating many, many plays of each games. In some cases, he also applies machine learning techniques to enable a machine to learn to play ..read more

Today's guest blogger is Christine Tobler, who's a developer at MathWorks working on core numeric functions.Hi everyone! I'd like to tell you a story about round-off error, the algorithm used in sum, and compability issues. Over the last few years, my colleague Bobby Cheng has made changes to sum to make it both more accurate and faster, and I thought it would be an interesting story to tell here.Table of ContentsNumerical issues in sum Different ways of computing the sum Making changes to sum References about accurately computing the sum Helper FunctionsNumerical issues in sumEven for a simp ..read more