Cleve Moler


Cleve Barry 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 libraries for numerical computing. He invented MATLAB, a numerical computing package, to give his students at the University of New Mexico easy access to these libraries without writing Fortran. In 1984, he co-founded MathWorks with Jack Little to commercialize this program.

Biography

He received his bachelor's degree from California Institute of Technology in 1961, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, both in mathematics. He worked for Charles Lawson at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1961 and 1962.
He was 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, he also worked for Intel Hypercube, where he coined the term "embarrassingly parallel", and Ardent Computer Corporation. He is also co-author of four textbooks on numerical methods and is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery. He was president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 2007–2008.
He 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. On April 30, 2004, he was appointed Honorary Doctor at the Technical University of Denmark. In April 2012, the IEEE Computer Society named Cleve the recipient of the 2012 Computer Pioneer Award. In February 2014, IEEE named Cleve the recipient of the 2014 IEEE John von Neumann Medal. In April 2017, he was made Fellow of the Computer History Museum.

Publications