MATLAB Inventor Visits ECE 101 Class

Dr. Cleve Moler—MATLAB inventor, MathWorks company co-founder, and former chair of UNM's Computer Science Department—addressed Professor Greg Heileman's ECE 101 class on April 8.

Dr. Moler told the story of MatLab's history, including its genesis at UNM. The software is used worldwide for engineering analysis and design.
Moler chaired the Computer Science Department at UNM's School of Engineering from 1980 to 1984, and before that he was a faculty member in UNM's Mathematics Department.

With MATLAB co-founder Jack Little, Moler recognized the need among engineers and scientists for more powerful and productive computation environments beyond those provided by languages such as Fortran and C. They combined their expertise in mathematics, engineering, and computer science to develop MATLAB, a high-performance technical computing environment. MATLAB combines comprehensive math and graphics functions with a powerful high-level language.

Before joining The MathWorks full time in 1989, Moler worked with two computer hardware manufacturers after serving as a professor of math and computer science for almost 20 years at Stanford and Michigan as well as UNM.

Moler's professional interests center on numerical analysis and mathematical software. He is co-author of three textbooks on numerical methods.