ABSTRACT
Matlab ® is generally recognized as the leading software for scientific computation. It was originally developed in the 1970s by Cleve Moler as an interactive Matrix Laboratory with matrix routines based on the algorithms in the LINPACK and EISPACK software libraries. In the original 1978 version everything in Matlab was done with matrices, even the graphics. Matlab has continued to grow and expand from the classic 1978 Fortran version to the current version, Matlab 7, which was released in May 2004. Each new release has included significant improvements. The graphics capabilities were greatly enhanced with the introduction of Handle Graphics and Graphical User Interfaces in version 4 (1992). A sparse matrix package was also included in version 4. Over the years, dozens of toolboxes (application libraries of specialized Matlab files) have been added in areas such as signal processing, statistics, optimization, symbolic math, splines, and image processing. Matlab’s matrix computations are now based on the LAPACK and BLAS software libraries. Matlab is widely used in linear algebra courses. Books such as [Leo06], [LHF03], and [HZ04] have extensive sets of Matlab exercises and projects for the standard first course in linear algebra. The book by D.J. Higham and N.J. Higham [HH03] provides a comprehensive guide to all the basic features of Matlab.
