Cleve Barry Moler

Inventor of MATLAB, a numerical computing package, Moler is an American mathematician and computer programmer specializing in numerical analysis. In the mid to late 1970s, he was one of the authors of LINPACK and EISPACK, FORTRAN scientific subroutine libraries for numerical computing. He created MATLAB to give his students at the University of New Mexico easy access to these libraries without writing FORTRAN. In 1984, he co-founded MathWorks in Portola Valley, California with Jack Little to commercialize this program, and has served as the company's Chief Scientist.

Moler was born into a family of journalists and grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. He developed an early interest in science and mathematics, pursuing technical hobbies such as ham radio. In 1961 he received his Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. He received his M.S. degree in 1963 and earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1965, both from Stanford University in Stanford, California.

He has taught as a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science for almost 20 years at the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the University of New Mexico. Before joining MathWorks full-time in 1989, Moler also worked for Intel Hypercube and Ardent Computer Corporation. He is also co-author of four textbooks on numerical methods and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery. He served as president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics from 2007 to 2008.

Moler was elected to the National Academy of Engineering on February 14, 1997. He received an honorary degree from Linköping University, Sweden. He received an honorary degree of Doctor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo on June 16, 2001, and on April 30, 2004, he was appointed Honorary Doctor (doctor technices, honoris causa) at the Technical University of Denmark.

In April 2012, the IEEE Computer Society named Moler the recipient of the 2012 Computer Pioneer Award. In February 2014, IEEE named him the recipient of the 2014 IEEE John von Neumann Medal.

He is the co-author of several books and publications including, but not limited to: "Computer methods for mathematical computations" with George E. Forsythe and Michael A. Malcolm, Prentice-Hall Series in Automatic Computation, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1977, MR 0458783 ISBN 0-13-165332-6. He is also the author of two online books: "Numerical Computing with MATLAB", Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 2004, ISBN 978-0-89871-560-6; and "Experiments with MATLAB", www.mathworks.com, 2009, ISBN-10, ISBN-13. Moler works remotely from his home office in Santa Fe, New Mexico, writing books, articles, and MATLAB programs.