Cleve Moler, MATLAB creator and numerical computing pioneer, dies

Cleve Moler, the mathematician and computer scientist who created MATLAB and co-founded MathWorks, has died. Moler originally built MATLAB in the late 1970s as a teaching tool to give his students easier access to LINPACK and EISPACK without forcing them to write Fortran, a decision that quietly reshaped how engineers and scientists interact with numerical software.

His influence runs deeper than one product. Moler was a co-author of the foundational LINPACK and EISPACK libraries, served as president of SIAM, and helped define the modern conventions for matrix computation that still underpin scientific computing, signal processing, and the linear algebra layers beneath today’s machine learning frameworks.

The Hacker News thread linking to his MathWorks founder bio drew the kind of response reserved for figures whose tools shaped careers — engineers recalling first encounters with MATLAB in university labs, and acknowledgment that much of the numerical infrastructure the industry now takes for granted traces back to his work.