An Introduction to Matlab 6.1, August 2001

Matlab is an interactive system for doing numerical computations. A numerical analyst called Cleve Moler wrote the first version of Matlab in the 1970s. It has since evolved into a successful commercial software package. Matlab relieves you of a lot of the mundane tasks associated with solving problems numerically. This allows you to spend more time thinking, and encourages you to experiment. Matlab makes use of highly respected algorithms and hence you can be confident about your results. Powerful operations can be performed using just one or two commands. You can build up your own set of functions for a particular application. Excellent graphics facilities are available, and the pictures can be inserted into LATEX and Word documents.