MATLAB: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

MATLAB, short for "Matrix Laboratory", refers to a numerical computation program, and its core programming language, created by The MathWorks. MATLAB allows one to easily manipulate matrices, plot functions and data, implement algorithms in its own internal programming language, create user interfaces, and interface with programs in other languages. It is used by more than 1,000,000 people in industry and academia. It runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux and Unix.

History

The language was invented by Cleve Moler in the late 1970s, then chairman of the computer science department at the University of New Mexico. He designed it to give his students access to LINPACK and EISPACK without having to learn Fortran. It soon spread to other universities and found a strong audience within the applied mathematics community. Jack Little, an engineer, was exposed to it during a visit Cleve Moler made to Stanford University in 1983. Recognizing its commercial potential, he joined with Cleve Moler and Steve Bangert. They rewrote MATLAB in C and founded The MathWorks in 1984 to continue its development. These rewritten libraries were lovingly known as JACKPAC. MATLAB was first adopted by control design engineers, Jack Little's specialty, but quickly spread to many other domains. It is also used in education, in particular the teaching of linear algebra and numerical analysis

This code, excerpted from the function magic.m, creates a magic square M for odd values of n.

[J,I] = meshgrid(1:n); A = mod(I+J-(n+3)/2,n); B = mod(I+2*J-2,n); M = n*A + B + 1;

MATLAB's primary competitor is commonly believed to be the symbolic computation program Mathematica, however MathWorkers (that is how MathWorks employees refer to themselves) consider Microsoft Excel to be their most frequent competitor. MATLAB is more convenient for numerical analysis and linear algebra than Mathematica, and is frequently used in the engineering community. Mathematica on the other hand has superior symbolic manipulation, making it popular among physicists. Another fundamental difference is that while MATLAB accepts scripts in a language very close to C, Mathematica uses its own functional language

Free software alternatives to MATLAB include GNU Octave, Scilab, R, Rlab, and APL descendants such as the J programming language.

Python, when used in combination with libraries such as Numeric Python and SciPy, also provides similar functionality.

IDL, the Interactive Data Language, was once a commercial competitor with MATLAB, and remains functionally competitive in many regards, although its market share has slipped drastically.