And Cleve Moler?

Another stalwart gone.  The founder and long-time leader of MatLab, Cleve Moler, just passed.   https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-cleve-moler-1939-2026/

 I first met Cleve when he was a sophomore at Caltech--I think Pete Rux introduced us, but I am not sure about that.   Actually, now that I think about it, it probably was my old high school idol, Karl Pool.

Cleve was one of those 'big men on campus' types, rooming at Ricketts House with an even bigger personality, Brad Efron.  Cleve (pronounced and named for his grandfather who was named Cleveland for the Ohio town) oozed personality, charisma, and in addition, he was obsessed with mathematics.  Brad was, too, but made his way into statistics where his fame now resides.

Cleve's goal was to make mathematics 'available' to the lay public, which explains how he came to create MatLab.  Heres the one sentence about MatLab that I find so wonderful:  MATLAB, the language of engineers and scientists, is a programming and numerical computation environment for algorithm development, data analysis, and visualization.  

Now I grant you that not every person walking up and down the sidewalk in Sacramento (or any other town in America) would be apt to describe such a sentence as truy math 'avaiable' to the lay public, but that is how Cleve saw it.

Searching old records, I found a Caltech newspaper from March 5, 1959 which listed the Ricketts House candidates for office in my sophomore year.  And sure enough, Brad was running for president, and Karl was running for Athletics Director.  Cleve was watching Brad tear up the landscape   https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/477/1/1959_03_05_60_20.pdf

I caught up with Cleve in January 2024, for an ACM Archive interview about his career.  It was a solid interview, akin to the one that Thomas Haigh had done twenty years prior for SIAM.   https://history.siam.org/oralhistories/moler.htm.   Tom's was the classic historian interview of a techie; mine was more of a Who and Why as seen from a colleague, characteristic of the 175 interviews I've done for ACM.   Each has value, while providing some different insights.   I have an unedited transcript and Video on request, but they seem unable to attach here (cockpit error, early Sunday morning).

The surprise for me was that Cleve was a Salt Lake City kid, and so were a number of classmates, including Roger Noll and our Nobelist, Kip Thorne.   Cleve played high school basketball with Roger; Roger and Kip were both in my class, and we had some sport talking about our various career paths. Remarkably, Cleve did not know Al Despain, also in my class, who went on at Berkeley to pioneer Chess Games with Dave Patterson, and later founding AcornTechnologies (not to be confused with the British Acorn Computers).   

My first wife was born and raised in Salt Lake City, and my long-time Forest Service partner, Irv McQuarrie led me to his cousin who co-founded Beehive Medical Electronics, with Homer Warner.  Alan Kay's first job while attending U of Utah was at Beehive, where he used my HP1300A XY display for his pioneering PC, the FlexMachine.   Ivan Sutherland was still at NSF, five months from joining the U of Utah to help establish their fabled Graphics program.   Somehow (lament, lament), the HP 1300A never gets mentioned as the first interactive dynamic display that was used at U of Utah's program.  Ah, well.   

Cleve 'found' Jack Dongarra, an intern at Argonne, and persuaded him to join Cleve in a new PhD program at the University of New Mexico.   Jack, later a storied ACM Turing winner, gives Cleve full credit and then some for his keen eye and key leadership for Jack's nascent career.

We've lost another good one, at a mere 86 years.  Au revoir, Cleve.