Congratulations to Cleve Moler, who has received the inaugural ICIAM Business Prize 2023 for “excellent contributions to the event of mathematical and computational instruments and strategies for the answer of science and engineering issues and his invention of MATLAB”.
I first noticed Cleve exhibit the unique Fortran model of MATLAB on an IBM PC on the Gatlinburg assembly on the College of Waterloo in 1984. The industrial model of MATLAB was launched quickly after, and it has been my predominant programming setting ever since.
MATLAB succeeded for quite a lot of causes, a few of which Dennis Sherwood and I describe in one of many creativity tales in our current e-book How one can Be Artistic: A Sensible Information for the Mathematical Sciences. However there’s one motive that’s hardly ever talked about.
From the start, MATLAB supported advanced arithmetic—certainly, the fundamental information sort has at all times been a posh matrix. The unique 1980 MATLAB Customers’ Information says
MATLAB works with primarily just one type of object, an oblong matrix with advanced parts. If the imaginary elements of the weather are all zero, they aren’t printed, however they nonetheless occupy storage.
Against this, early competing packages often supported solely actual arithmetic (see my 1989 SIAM Information article Matrix Computations on a PC for a comparability of PC-MATLAB and GAUSS). Cleve understood the elemental have to compute within the advanced airplane in actual life issues, versus textbook examples, and he appreciated how tedious it’s to program with actual and imaginary elements saved in separate arrays. The storing of zero imaginary elements of actual numbers was a small value to pay for the comfort. After all, the industrial model of MATLAB was optimized to not retailer the imaginary a part of reals. Management engineers—a bunch who have been early adopters of MATLAB—appreciated the MATLAB strategy, as a result of the soundness of management techniques depends upon eigenvalues, that are basically advanced.
One other smart selection was that MATLAB permits the imaginary unit to be written as i or j, thus protecting mathematicians and electrical engineers completely satisfied!
Right here is Cleve demonstrating MATLAB in October 2000: 
