 | |
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Mathematical computing software |
| Founded | December 7, 1984 in Portola Valley, California, U.S. |
| Founders |
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| Headquarters | , USA |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
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| Products | MATLAB, Simulink |
| Revenue |  US$1.25 billion (2022) [1] |
Number of employees | 6,000 [1] |
| Website | www |
MathWorks is an American privately held corporation that specializes in mathematical computing software. Its major products include MATLAB and Simulink, which support data analysis and simulation.
The company's key product, MATLAB, was created in the 1970s by Cleve Moler, who was chairman of the computer science department at the University of New Mexico at the time. It was a free tool for academics. Jack Little, who would eventually set up the company, came across the tool while he was a graduate student in electrical engineering at Stanford University. [2] [3]
Little and Steve Bangert rewrote the code for MATLAB in C while they were colleagues at an engineering firm. [2] [4] They founded MathWorks along with Moler in 1984, [4] with Little running it out of his house in Portola Valley, California. [5] Little would mail diskettes in baggies (food storage bags) to the first customers. [6] The company sold its first order, 10 copies of MATLAB, for $500 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in February 1985. [7] A few years later, Little and the company moved to Massachusetts. [5] [8] There, Little hired Jeanne O'Keefe, an experienced computer executive, to help formalize the business. [2] By 1997, MathWorks was profitable, claiming revenue of around $50 million, and had around 380 employees. [2]
In 1999, MathWorks relocated to the Apple Hill office complex in Natick, Massachusetts, purchasing additional buildings in the complex in 2008 and 2009, [9] ultimately occupying the entire campus. MathWorks expanded further in 2013 by buying Boston Scientific's old headquarters campus, which is near to MathWorks' headquarters in Natick. [10]
By 2018, the company had around 3,000 employees in Natick and said it had revenues of around $900 million. [11]
The company's two lead products are MATLAB, which provides an environment for scientists, engineers and programmers to analyze and visualize data and develop algorithms, and Simulink, a graphical and simulation environment for model-based design of dynamic systems. [12] [13] MATLAB and Simulink are used in aerospace, automotive, software and other fields. [14] The company's other products include Polyspace, SimEvents, Stateflow, and ThingSpeak.
In 1999, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against MathWorks and Wind River Systems alleging that an agreement between them violated antitrust laws. The agreement in question stipulated that the two companies agreed to stop competing in the field of dynamic control system design software, with MathWorks alone selling Wind River's MATRIXx Software and that Wind River would stop all research and development and sales in that field. Both companies eventually settled with the Department of Justice and agreed to sell the MATRIXx software to a third party. MathWorks had total sales of $200 million in 2001, with dynamic control system design software accounting for half of those sales. [15]
MathWorks's Simulink software was found to have infringed 3 patents from National Instruments related to data flow diagrams in 2003, a decision which was confirmed by a court of appeal in 2004. [16]
In 2011, MathWorks sued AccelerEyes for copyright infringement in one court, and patent and trademark infringement in another. AccelerEyes accepted consent decrees in both cases before the trials began. [17]
In 2012, the European Commission opened an antitrust investigation into MathWorks after competitors alleged that MathWorks refused to grant licenses to its intellectual property that would allow people to create software with interoperability with its products. [18] [19] The case was closed in 2014 without filing any charge. [20]
The logo represents the first vibrational mode of a thin L-shaped membrane, clamped at the edges, and governed by the wave equation, which was the subject of Moler's thesis. [3]
The company annually sponsors a number of student engineering competitions, including EcoCAR, an advanced vehicle technology competition created by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and General Motors (GM). [21] MathWorks sponsored the mathematics exhibit at London's Science Museum. [22]
In the coding community, MathWorks hosts MATLAB Central, an online exchange where users ask and answer questions and share code. MATLAB Central currently houses around than 145,000 questions in its MATLAB Answers database. [23] The company actively supports numerous academic institutions to advance STEM education (primarily through the use of MathWorks products), including giving funding to MIT Open Courseware and MITx. [24] [25]
MATLAB is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages.
Scilab is a free and open-source, cross-platform numerical computational package and a high-level, numerically oriented programming language. It can be used for signal processing, statistical analysis, image enhancement, fluid dynamics simulations, numerical optimization, and modeling, simulation of explicit and implicit dynamical systems and symbolic manipulations.
Simulink is a MATLAB-based graphical programming environment for modeling, simulating and analyzing multidomain dynamical systems. Its primary interface is a graphical block diagramming tool and a customizable set of block libraries. It offers tight integration with the rest of the MATLAB environment and can either drive MATLAB or be scripted from it. Simulink is widely used in automatic control and digital signal processing for multidomain simulation and model-based design.
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.
Stateflow is a control logic tool used to model reactive systems via state machines and flow charts within a Simulink model. Stateflow uses a variant of the finite-state machine notation established by David Harel, enabling the representation of hierarchy, parallelism and history within a state chart. Stateflow also provides state transition tables and truth tables.
John N. "Jack" Little is an American electrical engineer and the CEO and co-founder of MathWorks and a co-author of early versions of the company's MATLAB product.
OrCAD Systems Corporation was a software company that made OrCAD, a proprietary software tool suite used primarily for electronic design automation (EDA). The software is used mainly by electronic design engineers and electronic technicians to create electronic schematics, and perform mixed-signal simulation and electronic prints for manufacturing printed circuit boards (PCBs). OrCAD was taken over by Cadence Design Systems in 1999 and was integrated with Cadence Allegro in 2005.
SimEvents is a discrete event simulation tool developed by MathWorks. It adds a library of graphical building blocks for modeling queuing systems to the Simulink environment. It also adds an event-based simulation engine to the time-based simulation engine in Simulink
Ecolego is a simulation software tool that is used for creating dynamic models and performing deterministic and probabilistic simulations. It is also used for conducting risk assessments of complex dynamic systems evolving over time.
The ETAS Group is a German company which designs tools for the development of embedded systems for the automotive industry and other sectors of the embedded industry. ETAS is 100-percent subsidiary of Robert Bosch GmbH.
The Functional Mock-up Interface defines a standardized interface to be used in computer simulations to develop complex cyber-physical systems.
20-sim is a commercial modeling and simulation program for multi-domain dynamic systems, which is developed by Controllab. With 20-sim, models can be entered as equations, block diagrams, bond graphs and physical components. 20-sim is widely used for modeling complex multi-domain systems and for the development of control systems.
In applied mathematics, test functions, known as artificial landscapes, are useful to evaluate characteristics of optimization algorithms, such as:
dSPACE GmbH, located in Paderborn, Germany, is one of the world's leading providers of tools for developing electronic control units.
Rapid Control Prototyping (RCP) is a type of simulation methodology that allows for the rapid evaluation of control systems, especially for large machinery. It can test and evaluate algorithms as well as associated components such as sensors, actuators, pumps etc. The system requires some type of mock up, usually a scaled down version of the system to be tested, plus high powered computer simulation software. Rapid Control Prototyping has gained popularity thanks to its ability to accelerate product development and reduce their time-to-market. The approach also helps mitigate design risks, thanks to their early identification.
The Robotics Toolbox is MATLAB toolbox software that supports research and teaching into arm-type and mobile robotics. While the Robotics Toolbox is free software, it requires the proprietary MATLAB environment in order to execute. The Toolbox forms the basis of the exercises in several textbooks.
Integrated Systems Inc. (ISI) was an embedded software company founded by Naren Gupta in 1980/1981. Summit Partners invested in 1987, the company listed in 1990, and it was acquired by Wind River Systems in 2000.
The following table compares notable software frameworks, libraries and computer programs for deep learning.
The Commission decided, as a result of the formal investigation, to close the antitrust proceedings initiated on 29 February 2012 against MathWorks in case AT.39840.
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