MATLAB explained December 30, 2016

MATLAB Introduction

The programme MATLAB was developed by Cleve Moler,the chairman of computer science department at the University of New Mexico in the late 1970's. Usually to get access to LINPACK and EISPACK you would have to learn Fortan but Cleve developed the programme so that his students will have access to LINPACK and EISPACK without learning Fortan. The programme was made popular after it spread to different universities and was mostly used by applied mathematics community.

An engineer from Stanford University saw the commercial potential in the MATLAB programme in 1983 and rewrote MATLAB in C instead of Fortan and founded Mathworks in 1984 and continued its development. MATLAB was rewritten in 2000 to a newer set of libraries called LAPACK. MATLAB was first used by researchers and practitioners of control engineering. It also quickly spread to other domains, it is used mainly in education, in the teaching of linear algebra, numerical analysis and popular amongst scientist involved in imagine processing.

What is MATLAB?

It is often confusing to understand what MATLAB is exactly, MATLAB in a nut shell is a programme that is a less time consuming programme of attaining technical calculations required by other programmes. The MATLAB programme has several ways to analyse data and then present it in 2D and 3D models, it is also capable of interpolation and regression. MATLAB also works with other software such as Microsoft Excel, users can import data from workbooks and multimedia files. MATLAB is sophisticated enough to provide tools for algorithms and applications, for example its command window acts as both an input and output interface for data. MATLAB has a code analyser as well as a profiler. Users of MATLAB benefit greatly because it is extremely versatile. University professors use the programme to teach their students about fundamental and advanced science and mathematics, many scientists use it for research and development.

Disadvantages of MATLAB

One of the biggest disadvantages of MATLAB is that it is a costly piece of software. The standard package which is commercially sold is extremely expensive but on the other hand the non-commercial licence is cheaper. Usually students, academic researchers will have the software included the tuition fees.
MATLAB can use a larger amount of RAM than other programmes, for most application a typical computer will be fine but for this you might need to upgrade to a higher RAM computer.
Like other programmes MATLAB does not make for a good general purpose language, it does scientific language well but other programmes can use an array of different languages

London Training for excellence offers an excellent MATLAB Course, understanding let alone putting into practice the MATLAB programme can be difficult. The course aims to get you ready for the programme, it teaches you code with numerical analysis, implementation of algorithms and creation of user interfaces.

If you are keen to learn then go ahead and view our list of MATLAB courses in London.