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Cleve Moler visits ICME


ICME faculty and students were given the opportunity to connect with Cleve Moler, Cofounder of MathWorks , during Moler's visit at ICME on October 12 and 16, 2017.

Cleve Moler is chief mathematician, chairman, and cofounder of MathWorks. Moler was a professor of math and computer science for almost 20 years at the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the University of New Mexico. He spent five years with two computer hardware manufacturers, the Intel Hypercube organization and Ardent Computer, before joining MathWorks full-time in 1989. In addition to being the author of the first version of MATLAB, Moler is one of the authors of the LINPACK and EISPACK scientific subroutine libraries. He is coauthor of three traditional textbooks on numerical methods and author of two online books, Numerical Computing with MATLAB and Experiments with MATLAB.

On October 12, Moler spoke at the CME 510 seminar in which he shared clips of the first Star Trek movie, as the film included graphics he made 40 years ago about the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). Cleve also went over other recent novel applications of the SVD.

Afterwards, several seminar attendees took Moler for a dinner meeting on Stanford campus where they continued the seminar discussion. 

On October 16, Moler returned to ICME for the Distinguished Speaker Seminar Series in which he discussed how MATLAB has evolved over almost 40 years from a simple matrix calculator to a powerful technical computing environment. Moler also demonstrated several examples of MATLAB applications, and discussed current developments including parallel computation.

As a Thank You to Moler for his time and willingness to speak at both ICME seminars, a dinner meeting was held at downtown Palo Alto. Among the people who attended this dinner were ICME Director, Margot Gerritsen; ICME faculty, Michael Saunders; ICME Adjunct Professor, Alan Gous; and ICME students, Xiaotong Suo, Brad Nelson, Ron Estrin, and Ruilin Liu. Dinner attendees were given a chance to further connect with the speaker and continue discussion on mathematical related matters.

 

dinner after the Distinguished Seminar Series on Oct. 16