Cleve Moler, Inventor of MATLAB, Cofounder of MathWorks, is no more. I was quite stunned because I follow his blog and it felt like just a couple of weeks ago, he had published a post about oscillators!
I started using MATLAB in the second year of my undergrads (2008-09) and have not stopped since then. I didn’t know it had an inventor (like C or C++ had) for a long time, maybe I got to know about him after I started my graduate studies! When I first saw Cleve Moler’s Photo, I thought, “Sure, he looks like someone who could do numerical computing for a living!”. After that, at some point, I started following his posts (and those of other MathWorkers, too) and learning the “secrets” of MATLAB.
Even if MATLAB does not play a significant part in my research, it is still there prominently on my laptop, powering an “accounting” program, a (two) SuDoKu solver(s), a couple of image manipulators, a few games, and long forgotten GUIs that had once made me “famous” at IIT KGP! Whenever I get stuck in some research problem, I start up MATLAB and tinker with my existing programs learning new ways to do old things efficiently or make new programs after having learnt new things to try. It plays a crucial role in refreshing my grey cells and prepares me mentally to go back to my research problems with greater enthusiasm to solve them “this time”. Because it has never happened that a problem has remained unsolved in MATLAB, at least the programming part!
So, Thank You Cleve Moler for MATLAB. Your impact will be remembered for eons to come. Rest in peace.
