> Gordon Sande worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>

>> On 2008-09-09 16:16:39 -0300, Ron Ford said:
>>

>>> On Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:58:19 GMT, Gordon Sande posted:

>>

>>>> Sight unseen I would be willing to take a small bet that MatLab is likely
>>>> have packaged the pair for ready use with access to the intermediate forms
>>>> taking more trouble if even possible.

>>>
>>> Matlab being an educational tool and Hessenberg form being beyond the
>>> content for a semester of linear algebra, I would put up two dollars of
>>> risk capital to contend to the contrary.

>>
>> A full two semester course would have had Hessemberg forms as the nonsymmetric
>> analogue of tridiagonal forms. Both of which are preliminaries to finding
>> eigenvalues and eigenvectors.
>>
>> The guy who did Matlab was a professor of Computer Science speicalizing in
>> Numerical Analysis a long time ago so it is a sucker bet that all of NetLib
>> will be there. Look up Cleve Moler with google.

>
> While you are looking such things up, look up Eispack and note its
> authors. To save the 30 seconds of work that would take, I'll give the
> hint that one of them is Cleve Moler, making it even more of a sucker
> bet the Cleve would have used his own software in Matlab.
>
> I used to have a copy of the source code for the original Matlab (the
> arguably "public domain" one written in Fortran). I rather recall it as
> being pretty much a wrapper around the Eispack and Linpack stuff. Hmm,
> let's spend another 30 seconds in research...The Wikipedia reinforces my
> recollection. From the history section of its Matlab article
>
> "MATLAB was invented in the late 1970s by Cleve Moler, then chairman
> of the computer science department at the University of New Mexico.[3]
> He designed it to give his students access to LINPACK and EISPACK
> without having to learn Fortran."
>
> Following the reference 3 citation link on that page to Cleve's article
> on the origins of Matlab (hosted at the Mathworks site), we find that
> Cleve says
>
> "In the late 1970s, following Wirth's methodology, I used Fortran and
> portions of LINPACK and EISPACK to develop the first version of MATLAB."
>
> Hessenberg forms were certainly in my undergrad education in linear
> algebra. One uses them for all kinds of things, See, for example, the
> algebraic Riccatti equation (important in control theory).
>
> And where would Ron have gotten the strange idea that Matlab was solely,
> or even primarily an educational product? Wow is that far from the mark
> - very far - pretty much in the complete wrong direction. Matab is a
> darned expensive product aimed at professional use. The NASA site where
> I used to work paid over $100,00 per year for Matlab licenses. That's
> not exactly student prices. Perhaps Ron has only seen the educational
> version. One might take a hint from the fact that there is a separate
> educational version. That fairly obviously exists so that Mathworks can
> draw students into using the product, which they clearly would not do at
> the regular prices, and later those same students will push their
> employers to buy the product at the professional prices.