Thursday, March 29, 2012

MATLAB Virtual Conference 2012

Attended the MATLAB Virtual Conference yesterday. The session on Mathematical Modelling by Tucker McClure was quite a useful showcase of various features of MATLAB, such as MuPAD (which basically lets you create a Mathematica notebook to write up stuff), and the curve fitting and optimisation toolboxes.

MATLAB seems to have nice functionality to auto-generate lots of useful stuff, like generating code, scripts and reports ("publish"). Using two percent symbols (%%) is also nifty to break code into "cell mode" that can be run in little modular bits.

The time is probably coming, if it isn't already upon us, that these scientific programming tools will be used in the pre-university classroom.