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MATLAB News & Notes - June 2004
Meet the Developers
MathWorks developers come to the company from nearby and far afield, and with widely varying backgrounds. Here are two who brought a wealth of experience with them.
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Robert HensonAfter finishing Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge University, I needed a break from pure mathematics. For a number of reasons, though mostly to put off thinking about what to do next, I bought a one-way ticket to Japan. I intended to make a little money by teaching English and then travel around Asia for a few months before heading back to England and academia. Things didn’t quite work out that way and I ended up staying in Japan for seven years. |
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Steve JohnsonWhen I was about five years old,my grandfather, who worked for the Bureau of Standards, took me to see a computer—it was the size of a small house, and we literally walked through it. I can still remember the heat beating off the vacuum tubes and the hiss of the air conditioning. At that point, I decided I wanted to work with computers, and never looked back. |
More...Robert Henson
After finishing Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge University, I needed a break from pure mathematics. For a number of reasons, though mostly to put off thinking about what to do next, I bought a one-way ticket to Japan. I intended to make a little money by teaching English and then travel around Asia for a few months before heading back to England and academia. Things didn’t quite work out that way and I ended up staying in Japan for seven years.
Rather than teaching English, I got a job as a programmer at Cybernet Systems, the Japanese distributor for several engineering software packages including ANSYS and MATLAB®, in Tokyo. After a few years as an application engineer in Cybernet’s mechanical engineering group, I joined the MATLAB Applications Group as an application engineer and technical support specialist for MATLAB and the mathematical and financial toolboxes.
We had been translating the MATLAB manuals into Japanese for several years but MATLAB itself was still in English. Cybernet and The MathWorks decided to create a Japanese version of MATLAB and started looking for someone to do the work. I was a fairly obvious candidate and jumped at the chance. I was a little sad to leave Japan, but it was an opportunity not to be missed so I packed up, got married in Las Vegas, and moved to Boston. MATLAB 5.3 was translated into Japanese and the Japanese version of Simulink came out with MATLAB 6.
In addition to working on the Japanese version of MATLAB, I’ve done a variety of other jobs since moving here almost six years ago. I was quality engineer for the mathematical toolboxes, manager of the Language and Math Quality Engineering team, and also did one of the most feared jobs at The MathWorks: I was a "Buildmaster," the person responsible for making sure that all the code changes made by our developers work together.
A few years ago, we started selling more and more of our tools to biotechnology and pharmaceutical researchers. The Human Genome Project was in full swing and MATLAB was playing an important role.We set up a group to investigate what we should be doing in the life sciences, and I was offered the opportunity to lead this group. I now spend a lot of the time traveling and meeting customers but still write code and occasionally dabble with the Japanese version. We released the first version of the Bioinformatics Toolbox in October 2003 and are hard at work on the next release.
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Steve Johnson
When I was about five years old,my grandfather, who worked for the Bureau of Standards, took me to see a computer-it was the size of a small house, and we literally walked through it. I can still remember the heat beating off the vacuum tubes and the hiss of the air conditioning. At that point, I decided I wanted to work with computers, and never looked back.
When I got into college, there were effectively no computer courses, so I became a mathematics major and wrote my thesis in a very abstract branch of mathematics (category theory). But my career course was set by several summer jobs that I had at Bell Labs, and I joined them right out of graduate school. After a number of projects in psychometrics and computer music and a year as a manager in the computation center, I joined the computer research area, initially working on computer algebra.
This was truly a golden age at Bell Labs—brilliant theoretical computer scientists working closely with excellent programmers. I inherited a compiler for the B language from Dennis Ritchie, and this began an interest in compiling and languages that continues to this day. As part of the UNIX effort, I wrote the tool YACC to help build compilers, and used it to write the Portable C compiler that was moved to more than 200 architectures. I also worked with the designers on the first AT&T port of UNIX to a 32-bit machine.
I became a research manager, working for several years on compilers and tools for VLSI design, and found myself becoming less interested in research and more interested in building things that were useful. I transferred into the UNIX System V development group, and headed the language department there, producing everything from Pascal to Ada compilers. I also started a 20-year association with the USENIX Association, a computer users group, serving on the board and eventually as president. In 1986, I made the leap to Silicon Valley, where I spent 15 happy years working for some well-funded startups, several less well-funded ones, and was cofounder of another. I worked in 2-D and 3-D graphics, massively parallel computing, embedded systems, and, of course, compilers. I was also an early employee at Transmeta, a maker of Intel-compatible, low-power chips.
Between companies I consulted.Meeting Cleve Moler at one of the startups led to a long-distance consulting relationship with The MathWorks during 1993–95, when I built the first MATLAB Compiler. Two years ago, I was finally able to leave Silicon Valley and accept a "real" job at The MathWorks.
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