How can MATLAB help you with Maths?
MATLAB as a programming language is perhaps the most commonly used within the engineering profession along with a few more counterparts. Within this article you will be reading about historical development of this useful application along with basic MATLAB functions and applications.
According to its vendor, MATLAB is a special and interactive environment and programming language that allows users to carry out extensive calculations and various intensive computational tasks faster than other, well-known programming language.
MATLAB was invented Cleve Moler in 1970, who soon become the chairman of the computing department of the University of New Mexico. The original idea behind MATLAB was to create an environment in which students are able to use various packages working with linear algebra then it become popular among students of applied mathematics.
MATLAB as an engineering application was first recognized by Jack Little from the Stamford University. By recognizing strong commercial potential of the software Little and Moler; they founded the company MathWorks that is currently improving and managing the software.
The very first engineering application of MATLAB was conducted with control design engineering and then swiftly become popular among other engineering discipline. These days MATLAB is being used in applied mathematics education also.
MATLAB is used within several important sectors as a basic programming environment. The vendor claims that it is widely used for variety of purposes such as signal and image processing, control design, financial modeling and computational biology.
With MATLAB you should be able to analyze and develop algorithms, also the programming language are able to handle both vector and matrix operation. Also with MATLAB the intensity of developing the algorithms are likely to be much faster than many programming language such as C++. This is due to the unique MATLAB ability where one MATLAB command line can only be replaced by several lines from other programming language whilst still provide the standard programming language capabilities.
MATLAB also possess excellent data analysis capabilities. These capabilities include:
- Scaling and averaging
- Interpolation
- Threshold and smoothing
- Statistics and curve fittings
- Matrix operation and analysis
In addition to those above we need to mention here that MATLAB also capable to show correlations that are occurring between datasets in two and three-dimensional models. MATLAB is also an exceptional tool to carry out various numeric calculations for instance matrix manipulation, Fourier analysis, optimization and various differential equations.
It is important to say at this stage that in spite of many unique attributes of MATLAB there are functions to integrate codes from other programming language into this application.
Further of the basic capabilities there are several add-on products on the market that can improve MATLAB functions. These include add-ons for optimization, statistics, financial modeling, etc.
In this article you may have come across varies functions and short description of MATLAB. As you may have had seen here MATLAB is a unique programming environment focusing on usability rather being an overarching language. Within the engineering industry as well as in applied mathematics MATLAB seemed to be perhaps the most commonly used tool to solve various numerical problems. Should you be interested starting to learn programming and your aim is to create solutions for various calculation-related problems it is clear that after your research on available programming languages your choice will be MATLAB. We have no doubt on it!
Should you wish to know more about MATLAB you may like to visit MATLAB Central, the official exchange and support forum of the product.