As I said in my last post, here at the MathWorks Community blog we are currently celebrating an important milestone: MATLAB Central is 20 years old! It's a fine number, 20. Certain numbers just come across as friendly, and I've always been fond of 20. It's hanging out at the corner of Binary and Decimal, smiling pleasantly to everyone who walks by. What can we do to honor it and MATLAB Central? What are some of the factors that make 20 so admirable? I can think of a few. factor(20) ans = 1×3 2 2 5 Its literal factors make it clear that 20 is a so-called pronic number. That just means it takes the form n*(n+1). 4*5 ans = 20 That's pronicity for you. I love how you can take an uninteresting fact about a number, give it a fancy name, and suddenly it becomes more interesting [strokes goatee, saying "Yes, pronic. Yes."]. Now, what can we do with those factors? d = divisors(20) d =

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It’s been twenty years since we launched MATLAB Central. It's tempting to say that it’s been twenty years since we started the MATLAB online community. But of course that's not true! MATLAB Central succeeded largely because the community it serves was already in place. What we did was build that community a house, a house on the still-somewhat-new frontier of the World Wide Web. Maybe some of you, reading this today, were among the people who used the old anonymous FTP site that predated the File Exchange. Or maybe you answered questions on the Usenet MATLAB newsgroup, comp.soft-sys.matlab, that predated Answers. If you did, I’d love to hear from you down in the comments below.

This is what MATLAB Central looked like on launch day in 2001. I think the design still holds up pretty well! But I'm biased...

Five years ago, for our 15th anniversary, I told the story of

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I recently learned about something fun: customer lightning talks at the Japan MATLAB EXPO 2021. A lightning talk is a simple concept. It's just a very short talk, in this case, ten minutes long. I’ve always been a fan of this format because of my belief in the Iron Law of Asymmetric Interest:

You are always willing to talk about something longer than your audience is willing to listen.

These is a curious fact, because everyone has a visceral appreciation of it when they’re in the audience, yet they forget it the instant they step onstage. Such is human perversity.

The single best solution to this problem is to drastically limit presentation time. If you work at it, you can communicate a staggering amount of information in a very short time.

Anyway, back to Japan. The EXPO is a big annual conference on all things related to MATLAB and Simulink. The Lightning Talks have been a part of the Japan EXPO event

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File Exchange developer Randy Souza (you've heard of Souza's Law, right?) was looking at some file updates coming through the other day, and he noticed something remarkable. Erik Johnson's arrow contribution was being updated. We always love to see updates, but this one was special because the file was originally contributed back in 2003. This one file may be older than many of the people who use the File Exchange! In addition to its longevity, the arrow file has a number of accolades to brag about. It was a File Exchange Pick of the Week way back in 2009, and it was a Popular File of the Year in 2013 and 2014. Just look at the beautiful ASCII art on that help entry! You don't see quality craftsmanship like that anymore. Erik Johnson

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This week's post is by Mike Croucher. Mike is a member of the Customer Success Engineering team in the UK, working with academics around the country on their teaching and computational research. Mike has been a supporter of the Research Software Engineering movement since its inception and co-founded one of the first RSE groups in the UK. You can find Mike on Twitter (Mike Croucher (@walkingrandomly) / Twitter) and LinkedIn (Mike Croucher | LinkedIn)

by Mike Croucher

Anyone who has worked around academia for a long time will tell you that there are many roles in academic research that are vital-but-unrecognised.  Software development used to be one of them!  Back in 2012, a group of people decided to change this situation and created what has since become the Research Software

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See this? This is so cool.

What you're looking at is the new Scratch Pad area for Cody. It will make playing Cody more efficient, less messy, and more pleasant all the way around. If you've never played Cody before, you should try it just to see this new feature in action. Here's how it works.

There are more than 4,300 problems on Cody. So how do you decide where to start? I use Groups to focus my energy on one particular set of themed problems. I love the glow of satisfaction I get when I complete a group (and win the accompanying badge).

Lately I've been working on Indexing IV, the aptly-named fourth in a series of groups focused on indexing problems. Here's one I was just looking at:

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Akrem Hadji is a top contributor to Cody.  Here is a Q&A I did with Akrem who is a Telecommunications Engineer in Tunisia.                  

I started using MATLAB in 2012, during my engineering studies. We used MATLAB in class for signal processing. I recall the first exercise was to make an array of “Dirac'' pulses. After that, every lesson was a new opportunity to explore more tools. My skill has improved with time. In the beginning I remember that the MATLAB language was very practical with an arsenal full of all the needed functions. By the end of the first year in

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The Live Editor combines code, output, and formatted text in a single executable notebook. Last year, we introduced this notebook-y (notebook-esque?) goodness in the MATLAB Mobile app on your iPhone or iPad. This post is a primer on what you can do with Live Scripts on your iOS device.

Before we dive in, a note to our Android users: do not despair, for the Live Editor will make its way to your devices in the near future!

On the iPad, MATLAB Mobile sports a three-panel design for you to customize your real estate. View your Live Script side-by-side with your file browser (or other tabs) and the command window. Or, if you prefer to only view your editor, that’s fine as well.

You can interact with your Live Scripts by navigating through the individual sections, evaluating them independently (by tapping on the left margin of the section to run) or all together to view the output or visualizations that your code

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What to do? It's nearly February 14th, and what, oh what will you get your sweet one? Your very own osculating curve? The one who rounds you up every day? Who's always acute even when you're obtuse? Don't worry, my friends! The MATLAB Community Blog has you covered. We've been hard at work, combing through the File Exchange, looking for exactly what you need. Because nothing says "I love you" quite like a delicate bouquet of code (and its accompanying image). There are so many hidden gems on the File Exchange, treasures large and small, patiently waiting to be discovered. Here I present to you Valentine, by Richard Schulman. Valentine But wait... there's more! Don't just pique their interest when you can bowl them over. As an extra floral bonus. I'm going to give you something written by Alison Eele, from our UK office. Alison fashioned this from an algorithm originally written by

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The other day I received this email from my friend Jos. Very thoughtful of him! After a recent meeting, we were discussing the UK's notable decline in coal consumption. Jos had found some data from a government website and shared it with me via MATLAB Drive. Please note that all the numbers shown here have to do with the energy used to generate electricity (as opposed to, say, heat or transportation). Because we both use MATLAB Drive, Jos can leave his code and data in place and just issue the invitation. Once I accept it, I can work in the same exact folder, thereby avoiding a lot of back and forth messaging with attachments. I accepted the invitation and saw a folder with a spreadsheet, two import routines, and a file called runme.m. Here's that runme.m file from Jos. And when I run it, this is the result. Sure

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